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Post by Admin on Nov 9, 2021 15:46:12 GMT
Speaker Pelosi Holds Press Conference With Congressional Delegation at COP26
Join Members of Congress and me live at COP26 in Glasgow for a press conference on the urgency of the climate crisis and the significant climate action that both President Biden and House Democrats continue to take to meet and beat our climate goals.
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Post by Admin on Nov 9, 2021 19:57:52 GMT
While COP26 negotiators wrestle with a long list of knotty issues, their difficulties have been overshadowed by the box office power of former US President Barack Obama.
In a powerful address, Obama criticised the absence of the leaders of China and Russia as showing a “dangerous lack of urgency” on the issue of climate change.
He outlined the scale of the challenge ahead, saying the world was “nowhere near where it needs to be,” and he scolded countries who had made pledges in Paris but failed to carry them out.
The bulk of his remarks were dedicated to young people, to motivating them to channel their anger and frustration with the lack of progress into action.
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Post by Admin on Nov 10, 2021 19:09:58 GMT
The first draft of an agreement to combat climate change being negotiated at the U.N. Climate Change Conference was released early Wednesday morning, and while certain provisions represent landmark progress in the effort to avert catastrophic climate change, activists and experts say it still falls short of what is needed in several key areas. “This is not a plan to solve the climate crisis,” said Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, at a Wednesday morning press briefing at the climate summit, also known as COP26. “It won’t give the kids on the street the confidence they need,” she added, referring to the mostly young activists who have been marching during the conference in Glasgow to demand stronger climate action. Last week, world leaders including President Biden and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson made speeches at the conference, calling with soaring rhetoric for the world to tackle the climate crisis. Although the first draft of the final agreement and the pledged actions by individual nations thus far reflect greater ambition than the preceding Paris Agreement from 2015, they still would lead to a rise in global temperatures of 1.8 to 2.6 degrees Celsius, rather than the widely shared goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. “The text is not as strong as the political direction given last week,” said Alden Meyer, who studies U.S. climate policy for European think tank E3G, at the Wednesday briefing. “This draft COP decision text is too weak,” said Tracy Carty, head of Oxfam’s COP26 delegation, in a statement. “It fails to respond to the climate emergency being faced by millions of people now who are living with unprecedented extreme weather and being pushed further into poverty.” The three biggest points of contention with the draft, experts said, are the need for more immediate action to limit emissions, the future use of fossil fuels and the amount of financing being offered to developing countries to build a clean energy economy and deal with the already-occurring and inevitable future effects of climate change.
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Post by Admin on Nov 15, 2021 19:01:37 GMT
"I, for one, hope that this conference will be one of those rare occasions where everyone will have the chance to rise above the politics of the moment, and achieve true statesmanship."
In her speech for the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, The Queen spoke of the importance of joining together to tackle the challenges facing the planet.
The Queen has addressed the COP26 summit, touching on the future, politics, and her late husband.
In a poignant message the monarch said that "none of us will live forever. But we are doing this not for ourselves but for our children and our children's children, and those who will follow in their footsteps".
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Post by Admin on Dec 28, 2021 22:49:44 GMT
Greta Thunberg harshly criticized President Joe Biden’s policy on the climate, telling The Washington Post in an interview that it’s "strange" he’s considered a leader in the movement. When asked by the Post if she is inspired by any world leaders, and specifically "by President Biden," the Swedish teenager who became popular for chastising United Nations officials for a lack of focus on climate change replied, "If you call him a leader I mean, it’s strange that people think of Joe Biden as a leader for the climate when you see what his administration is doing." Thunberg added that the "U.S. is actually expanding fossil fuel infrastructure," stressing, "It should not fall on us activists and teenagers who just want to go to school to raise this awareness and to inform people that we are actually facing an emergency." She continued, "People ask us, ‘What do you want?’ ‘What do you want politicians to do?’ And we say, 'First of all, we have to actually understand what is the emergency.'" Thunberg emphasized that lack of knowledge on climate change on the part of world leaders further complicates solving the problem, noting that "in Sweden, we ignore — we don’t even count or include more than two-thirds of our actual emissions. "How can we solve a crisis if we ignore more than two-thirds of it? So it’s all about the narrative. It’s all about, What are we actually trying to solve?" Last month, Thunberg slammed this year's COP26 in Glasgow as "a PR event" and accused world leaders of "greenwashing," according to Axios.
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