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The Paris Climate Deal Is President Obama’s Biggest Accomplishment
This weekend, leaders from 196 countries approved the first global agreement to limit greenhouse-gas emissions in human history. The pact is a triumph of international diplomacy shared by diplomats across the planet. It also represents the culmination of a patient strategy by the Obama administration that unfolded over years, and which even many sympathetic journalists long dismissed as fanciful. Obama’s climate agenda has lurked quietly on the recesses of the American imagination for most of his presidency. It is also probably the administration’s most important accomplishment.
1. Climate change is different from other issues. The Obama administration has enacted important reforms to prevent a Great Depression, reform health care, overhaul the financial system and education, and craft important breakthroughs with Iran and Cuba. But climate change occupies a category of its own. The damage from climate change is irreversible. Melted glaciers cannot be easily refrozen; extinct species cannot be reborn; flooded coastal cities are unlikely to be rebuilt. Action to mitigate climate change has an urgency nothing else can match.
2. Paris is a BFD. In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called for a global treaty to limit the effects of greenhouse-gas emissions. The United Nations spent the next quarter century trying, and failing, to organize effective world action, despite increasingly dire warnings of massive, deadly, irreversible change that would threaten human life as we know it. An extremely simple conclusion can be drawn from this timeline: A worldwide-climate-change agreement is incredibly hard to do. If the Paris agreement were a simple matter of serving some nice French meals and writing some vague feel-good goals, it would have taken less than a quarter-century to happen.
1. Climate change is different from other issues. The Obama administration has enacted important reforms to prevent a Great Depression, reform health care, overhaul the financial system and education, and craft important breakthroughs with Iran and Cuba. But climate change occupies a category of its own. The damage from climate change is irreversible. Melted glaciers cannot be easily refrozen; extinct species cannot be reborn; flooded coastal cities are unlikely to be rebuilt. Action to mitigate climate change has an urgency nothing else can match.
2. Paris is a BFD. In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called for a global treaty to limit the effects of greenhouse-gas emissions. The United Nations spent the next quarter century trying, and failing, to organize effective world action, despite increasingly dire warnings of massive, deadly, irreversible change that would threaten human life as we know it. An extremely simple conclusion can be drawn from this timeline: A worldwide-climate-change agreement is incredibly hard to do. If the Paris agreement were a simple matter of serving some nice French meals and writing some vague feel-good goals, it would have taken less than a quarter-century to happen.
Much MOre~
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/12/climate-deal-is-obamas-biggest-accomplishment.html?mid=twitter_dailyintelligencer#
http://theobamadiary.com/2015/12/14/early-bird-chat-605/#comments
It's a BFD Obama Supporters!
Jeff Gauvin @JeffersonObama
#ParisAgreement
12:36 PM - 12 Dec 2015 26 26 Retweets
21 21 likes
http://theobamadiary.com/2015/12/12/up-next-president-delivers-a-statement-on-the-climate-agreement/
I want to Thank SOS John Kerry and all the Leaders across the Planet who worked so long and hard for this Historic Paris Climate Change Agreement.
[img]
[/img] Tim McDonnell
✔ @timmcdonnell
This is the face of a man who knows something awesome is about to happen #COP21
6:58 AM - 12 Dec 2015
135 135 Retweets 128 128 likes
President Obama's Group~Mahalo~
23 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Such as saving the economy from total collapse
for this? I doubt it.
At least it will go a long way to helping Climate Change.. that's the main thing!
of history!
You're Welcome
Thank you!
"failure of leadership". He is so on the wrong side of history.
How US negotiators ensured landmark Paris climate deal was Republican-proof
At 11.30pm Paris time, a small group of White House officials dashed into a temporary plywood hut in the exhibition hall where, a few hours earlier, a historic legal agreement to cut emissions causing climate change was secured. They were just in time to catch a live feed of Barack Obama declaring “a turning point for the world”.
These were the officials who helped set the US negotiating position for the talks – or, perhaps more accurately, helped craft the deal according to US specifications in order to insulate Obama and the agreement from attacks.
When it came to Republicans in Congress, they wanted the agreement to be bullet-proof. That was no easy feat in a negotiation over an immensely complicated challenge involving nearly 200 countries, and half a dozen rival negotiating blocs.
“We met the moment,” Obama said in his address. The Paris agreement on its own would not end climate change, he said, but “this agreement will help delay or avoid some of the worst consequences of climate change, and will pave the way for even more progress, in successive stages, over the coming years”.
The rest of the fascinating story..
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/13/climate-change-paris-deal-cop21-obama-administration-congress-republicans-environment?CMP=share_btn_tw
Thank you, Tarheel!
At 11.30pm Paris time, a small group of White House officials dashed into a temporary plywood hut in the exhibition hall where, a few hours earlier, a historic legal agreement to cut emissions causing climate change was secured. They were just in time to catch a live feed of Barack Obama declaring “a turning point for the world”.
These were the officials who helped set the US negotiating position for the talks – or, perhaps more accurately, helped craft the deal according to US specifications in order to insulate Obama and the agreement from attacks.
When it came to Republicans in Congress, they wanted the agreement to be bullet-proof. That was no easy feat in a negotiation over an immensely complicated challenge involving nearly 200 countries, and half a dozen rival negotiating blocs.
“We met the moment,” Obama said in his address. The Paris agreement on its own would not end climate change, he said, but “this agreement will help delay or avoid some of the worst consequences of climate change, and will pave the way for even more progress, in successive stages, over the coming years”.
The rest of the fascinating story..
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/13/climate-change-paris-deal-cop21-obama-administration-congress-republicans-environment?CMP=share_btn_tw
Thank you, Tarheel!
Keep telling me there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans! 
History will show how important this is.. and people who acknowledge and appreciate it are on the right side of history now.
Mahalo yalerdawg!
Thank you!
