October 5 marked a milestone for the the Paris Climate Agreement, which was signed by 196 countries at the 21st Session of the Conference of the Parties at the 2015 United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP-21). On that date, the agreement was officially ratified because 55 countries, representing a minimum of 55 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions formally entered into the agreement. The agreement will come into force on November 4.
The United States formally entered the Paris agreement on September 3, together with China, when President Obama and President Xi submitted their official “instruments” of approval of the agreement to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon during the G20 meeting in Hangzhou, China. The United States and China are the world’s two largest emitters of greenhouse gases, representing 40 percent of global emissions.
In a speech marking the event, President Obama said, “Some day we may see this as the moment when we decided to save our planet.” He added, “There are no shortage of cynics who thought the agreement would not happen. But they missed two big things: The investments that we made to allow for incredible innovation in clean energy, and the strong, principled diplomacy over the course of years that we were able to see pay off in the Paris Agreement.”
In remarks made on the day the agreement was officially ratified, the President said, “If we follow through on the commitments this agreement embodies, history may well judge it as a turning point for our planet." He added, “One of the reasons I ran for this office was to make America a leader in this mission. Over the past eight years we have done just that.” Obama acknowledged that even if the world meets the targets set forth in the Paris agreement, “we will only get to part of where we need to go.”
Republicans, however, disagreed with Obama’s sentiments. In a statement, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said, “The Paris climate deal would be disastrous for the American economy. It carelessly throws away the great gains that the United States has made over the past decade in energy development…The result will be higher energy costs for Americans—which will be especially painful for the poorest among us. Furthermore, President Obama has once again acted unlawfully by signing an international treaty without Senate ratification, as required by the Constitution.”