Topic: Politics and International Agreements

Will the Paris climate deal save the world? Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone. January 13, 2016.

It will probably be 10 years before anyone can say whether the Paris climate deal, which was agreed to with much hoopla on December 12th, was a historic event that marked the moment when the human race finally got serious about the fight against climate change, or just a United Nations therapy session whose main role was to make us feel better about our headlong plunge toward climate catastrophe.... 

Before it can enter legal force, the agreement will need to be formally ratified by 55 nations. That won't be a problem in the U.S. – because of the way the agreement is structured, President Obama can sign off on it without submitting it to the Senate. But it will likely take a year or longer for other nations to formalize the agreement. Meanwhile, there is still a lot of detail work to do regarding the rules on complex issues like how emissions will actually be monitored and verified. But the real threat to the agreement is not procedural but political: "The most critical question is how to sustain political momentum," says the Environmental Defense Fund's Dan Dudek. "As governments change, how can the will to implement INDCs be mustered over successive administrations? This is the real global governance issue."...

In the end, the most striking thing about the Paris agreement may be the degree to which it bets the future of civilization on individual actions... And depending on your view of human nature, that may be the most risky bet of all.

Chomsky: Republicans are a danger to the human species. alternet.

The Republican majority vote eliminates any future legal step through a court of appeal and eliminates all the opinions of the courts that preceded this decision. Their message to the participants at the Paris conference is, in practice, “Go to hell.” 

Not that the Paris conference had achieved much in terms of limiting global warming, but it must be remembered that the most thorny and difficult problem was getting the agreements made between governments to be binding through an international treaty. And France knew well that the Republican Party in the Senate would never ratify agreements binding on the government. Consequently the five Republican judges on the Supreme Court virtually expressed, with their decision, what they think of the rapid advance toward the destruction of the planet and the human species.

The human species is facing a situation that is unprecedented in the history of Homo sapiens,” he said. “We are at the crossroads of a situation that has never occurred before, and very soon we will have to decide whether we want the human species to survive into something that has the appearance of existence as we know it, or if we want to create a planetary devastation so extreme that one cannot even imagine what could emerge.