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Article

22 Apr 2016

Author:
Justin Gillis & Coral Davenport, New York Times (USA)

Experts say climate actions needs to be accelerated to meet Paris agreement goals

"Leaders Roll Up Sleeves on Climate, but Experts Say Plans Don’t Pack a Wallop", 21 Apr 2016

Big uncertainties hung over the climate deal even as the wording was being finalized in Paris, and in some ways, they have only grown since December...President Obama’s domestic climate program was essential in helping him lobby other countries to reach a deal, but it was thrown into turmoil in February when the Supreme Court temporarily shelved his Clean Power Plan. Continue reading the main story In developing countries, hundreds of coal-burning power plants are still on the drawing board. And oil and gas companies continue to invest billions of dollars a year searching for new reserves of fossil fuels. All those factors mean that a goal established by the governments of the world in 2009 — limiting the warming of the planet to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius, above the preindustrial level — remains far out of reach...The plans that countries offered in Paris would, even if faithfully carried out, fall far short of cutting emissions enough to meet the goal. Moreover, Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, noted this week that most of those plans run only to 2030, with countries still offering no hint of how they might eradicate greenhouse emissions by the 2050s...Even more significant, perhaps, is that most of the capital being spent in the world to build new power plants is being spent on renewables, twice as much in 2015 as on fossil-fired power plants, Bloomberg New Energy Finance found...Most of the existing power plants still run on nonrenewable energy, however, and because the plants last for decades, that is likely to change only slowly. Wind turbines and solar panels are now supplying about 10 percent of the world’s electricity, a figure that has doubled in the last decade. The pace of adoption would need to rise sharply to meet the broad climate goals...

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