Why is the paris agreement failing
Paris Agreement has failed. What now?
if you want to know how your country is doing on its commitments towards keeping the global
temperature rises to well below two degrees above pre-industrial levels then you could do
worse than checking out this website it's called climate action tracker and it's got loads of neat
and tidy graphs and summaries of exactly what's happening where you live and whether those things
are contributing towards your country meeting its targets or not there's 32 major countries
plus the entire EU block in the tracker and each country gets measured against one of six criteria
there's role-model which is fantastic one point five degrees compatible which is okay two degrees
compatible which is also okay and then we've got insufficient leading to a world that's three
degrees warmer than pre-industrial levels after that we've got highly insufficient leading to a
world of four degrees more than pre-industrial levels and then critically insufficient which
is leading to a world of more than four degrees warmer than pre-industrial levels so a thought
first of all it'd be nice to have a look at all the countries that are providing a role model
but there are any of those only Morocco and Gambia are coming in at one point five degrees compliant
and they've got a total combined population of about 38 million people which is not 0.5%
of the human species apart from those two countries the only other nations that are
even getting to a 2 degrees compatible rating are Bhutan Costa Rica Ethiopia the Philippines
and India so climate change mitigation then there are some good bits but it's mostly bad
hello and welcome to just everything bearing in mind of course that all the countries on this
tracker all signed up to the 2015 Paris agreement which said we'd all put in place reductions that
would keep our global temperature to well below two degrees above pre-industrial levels
three years later and all these countries are still rated as insufficient let's have a look
at the commentary from the EU for example despite the political discussion about more
ambitious renewable energy energy efficiency and emissions reductions goals the EU Emissions began
increasing again in 2017 driven by lignite and natural gas based electricity generation and the
industrial sector and the other countries in this category all have similar challenges then we move
up to the highly insufficient rating no massive surprises here Canada gets a bit of a kicking
because of the repeal of the cap-and-trade system in Ontario which is responsible for
almost a quarter of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions and the subsequent cancellation of the
provinces electric and hydrogen vehicle incentive program and of course the decision by the federal
government to move ahead with the trans mountain pipeline to transport oil from Alberta's tar sands
to export ports of course China's normally the whipping boy of climate change and despite an
exponential growth of renewables in their country and their attempts at positioning themselves as a
global climate leader they do still have a massive challenge on their hands discouragingly according
to the climate tracker a rising coal consumption drove Chinese carbon dioxide emissions to a new
high in 2017 which will likely be exceeded again when the figures come out for 2018 with current
policies CO2 emissions in China may level off in the next few years but total greenhouse gas
emissions are projected to rise until at least 2030 but China is not actually in the worst group
the category the tracker called critically insufficient there's a few names there that
will probably be no surprise like Saudi Arabia Russia Turkey but tragically and some might say
catastrophically the United States of America has now slipped into this very exclusive naughty boys
club why well according to the tracker the Trump administration spent most of 2018 systematically
dismantling the US federal climate policy if the proposed actions are fully implemented greenhouse
gas emissions projections for the year 2030 could increase by up to four hundred megatons of CO2
equivalent over what was projected when President Trump entered office that's almost as much as the
entire state of California emitted in 2016 in a series of rollbacks the Trump administration
has put forward a weak replacement for the clean power plan proposed to freeze vehicle
efficiency standards after 2020 and will not enforce regulations to limit highly potent HFC
emissions the administration will also allow methane leaks from oil and gas production to
continue for longer before they're found and fixed I won't go on I could but I won't I will of course
leave a link to this extremely useful resource in the comment section below so you can go and
have a look all the statistics at your leisure given all that information it should come as no
surprise that climate activism is growing quickly all over the world and not just raising awareness
of the issues either these groups have been banging that drum for years and years and to
them it feels more like banging their head against a brick wall so there's a growing
global movement of peaceful civil disobedience and protest against the lamentable lack of urgency in
action from all our governments and in the case of some administration's a willful obstruction of
any progress at all I'll leave links to all those Climate Action websites in the comments section
below listed by country so you can go and have a look at how you can get involved at your local
level in recent months though two relatively new movements have come to international prominence
in the summer of 2018 Greta Thunberg then aged 15 skipped school and went and sat outside the
Swedish Parliament to protest against the lack of action for climate change in doing so she
inadvertently kicked off a global movement the school strikes for climate movement now also
known as Friday's For Future has swept across the planet a simple defiant action that demonstrates
the will of Thunberg's generation to take the lead on forcing action to mitigate the worst
effects of the appalling mess we're leaving for them Thunberg herself has now spoken in front
of the United Nations a COP 24 you only speak of a green eternal economic growth because you are
too scared of being unpopular you only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got
us into this mess even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake you you
are not mature enough to tell it like it is even that burden you leave to us children she's also
addressed the world's very richest people at the World Economic Forum in Davos adults keep saying
we owe it to the young people to give them hope but I don't want your hope I don't want you to be
hopeful I want you to panic I wanted to feel the fear I feel every day and then I wanted to act now
there's been accusations and insinuations recently by countries like Ukraine and even Chancellor
Merkel of Germany that Russia has been stirring up these kids groups online in order to destabilize
Europe Thunberg is wise to all of this and she addressed that issue head-on when she spoke to
the EU back in February when many politicians talk about the school strike for the climate they talk
about almost anything except from the climate crisis many people are trying to make the school
strikes a question of whether we are promoting truancy whether we should go back to school or
not they make up all sorts of conspiracies and call us puppets who cannot think for ourselves
they are desperately trying to remove the focus from the climate crisis and change the subject
during the week of March the 15th there were well over 1.6 million strikers on all seven continents
across 125 countries and in two thousand different locations and they'll continue to go from strength
to strength as our politicians realize that not only is climate change not going away but their
populations are now waking up to the scale of the issues and becoming increasingly angry as
they discovered just how much our leaders have known and for how long and just how
little they've done about it and that brings me neatly onto the second climate activist movement
that's become globally renowned in an extremely short space of time I'm talking about Extinction
Rebellion born out of the Rise Up movement Extinction Rebellion came into being in May
2018 and was launched in October by Roger Hallam Gayle Bradbrook and Simon Bradwell Extinction
Rebellions priorities are pretty straightforward they're demanding that governments tell the truth
about the climate and wider ecological emergency reverse inconsistent policies and work alongside
the media to communicate with citizens they also want the government to enact legally binding
policy measures to reduce carbon emissions to Net Zero by 2025 which is pretty ambitious by
anybody's standards and they're calling for a national citizens assembly to oversee the
changes as part of creating what they call a democracy fit for purpose it's basically the
sort of organization that prompts the Daily Mail to call the fire brigade just in case their entire
editorial team all spontaneously combust in one enormous firework display of incandescent fury and
outrage essentially the group's core activity is peaceful civil disobedience with a sort of
added level of persistence and belligerents until the police have no choice but to arrest
them thus maximizing press coverage and the spread of the message globally they've already
occupied government buildings including the Scottish Parliament prompting councils up and
down the country even the Mayor of London said he can to declare a climate emergency and put
radical measures in place to start addressing the issues tomorrow Monday the 15th of April
2019 extinction rebellion plan to hold their most audacious action to date but here's where
the persistence and belligerence comes in because this isn't planned to be a one-day March this is
going to be a two-week event blocking all the major vehicular arteries of the UK's capital
city every single day they're pretty full on these people they got families coming down
with tents and all sorts it looks set to be a proper Street party atmosphere of non-violent
polite and courteous total disobedience even Rowan Williams is getting involved in English to
be the Archbishop of Canterbury it's not at all surprising that people in this urgent situation
feel they've got to take non-violent direct action they've got to find a way of putting
the case for the human race before those in power that's what Extinction Rebellion is doing that's
what the Friday strikes are doing you can't get much more polite than that now I work in London
so I'm going out and about tomorrow with my video camera to hopefully capture as much of the action
as possible and we'll edit all that together into a separate program which will publish on this
channel as soon as we can get it compiled that's it for this week though please do give us a like
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it's absolutely free to subscribe all you need to do is click that link there if you are going
down to London tomorrow have a safe journey maybe I'll see you there in the meantime though thanks
very much for watching have a great week and remember to just have a think see you next week
