Editorial: 5 reasons for frustration — and hope — as the world prepares for another U.N. climate summit
Posted February 25, 2017 12:00 am
By Peter Erikson
Peter Erikson is a senior fellow at the Center For American Progress and the author of the book “Global Warming: The Climate Crisis.”
The last time the world held an international climate summit, I was working at the World Bank as a senior adviser on energy and environment. The last time, the world was more than willing to do something about climate change. And yet, even though that’s not the world we are now, we still have plenty of work to do in getting ready for the U.N. Climate Summit this month in New York.
For this month’s COP22 in Bonn, the world must prepare for a more aggressive world government, with a new United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a new set of global goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, new treaties to cut down on oil and gas drilling, a new treaty to limit carbon pollution in the oceans and a host of smaller treaties, including agreements to address the health effects of climate change and the migration and displacement created by extreme events, to name just a few.
The world has not come to accept that climate change is real and that we have a moral imperative to act. The United Nations climate negotiations in Paris in 2015 did not work; the world was not able to agree on a target for meeting the Paris climate goals. The U.N. climate change conference, held in Marrakesh in December 2016, did not deliver either. It’s now up to the U.N. Conference of Parties (COP) in Bonn this month to do this and to prepare for the second U.N. climate summit to come up in New York. It’s clear that climate change is a world problem and everyone
