United States President Barack Obama last week called the Paris Agreement “historic” after enough countries had ratified the agreement.

The Paris Agreement will go into effect Nov. 4. The agreement between 73 of the 195 countries in the world — representing more than 56 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions — is a global commitment to cut emissions and slow the effects of climate change.

The Daily Orange spoke with Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, about the historic agreement.

The Daily Orange: What is the Paris climate agreement?

Gavin Schmidt: It’s a first step. It’s an acknowledgment across the globe that this is a global problem that requires a global solution. And really, it’s the first time that every country has decided to pitch in.

So this is a step forward because people are volunteering to make a commitment to make contributions and this is the way that this is going to be coordinated. It’s a process. It’s the beginning of a journey and hopefully it’s a journey that leads to much greater emission cuts than are currently in position.

The D.O.: What do you think of the U.S. Republicans’ opposition to this agreement?

G.S.: If you look across the Republican party and you look for concern about climate change, the majority of Republicans are actually in favor of reducing carbon emission, but there’s a very vocal minority who thinks, ‘Nothing’s going on, everything’s fine and I can’t hear you because my head is stuck in the sand.’ It’s really only an issue (in the U.S.), it’s not a global issue and this is a global agreement. The extent to which the globe should wait on the more insane elements of one of the political parties in the U.S. before they do anything is a little bit unclear.

The D.O.: Some Republicans say that the agreement will be terrible for the economy. Is there any truth to that argument?

G.S.: No, not really. We’ve already been cutting emissions. We’re already on track to cut emissions something like 17 or 18 percent since 2005 levels and this has been in the growing economy with growing employment. It turns out that people are pretty good at finding ways to create jobs while building renewable technology.

People mining coal will lose their job. Well, there’s actually very few people mining coal, and if you’ve ever met a coal miner, they’re very proud of what they do but they don’t think it’s a good job. So, those are communities that need help in this transition. It’s not their fault that the product of coal is carbon dioxide. They didn’t design that. In any transition, there are going to be people who are vulnerable and they need to be helped. But once you work out that what you’re doing is causing harm beyond the good that it’s causing, then you should stop. To do otherwise is totally unethical.

The D.O.: How will this agreement affect the next few generations?

G.S.: It’s not the agreement itself that will have the impact, it’s what people will do in support of it. Pieces of paper don’t do anything in and of themselves. There are thousands of pieces of paper all over the world that proclaim good things and nothing actually happens.

So what’s going to affect the next generations is what countries do. If they do nothing, we’re going to see increasingly accelerating climate change, we’re going to see increasing heat waves, increasing intense precipitation, increasing loss of sea ice in the arctic, etc.

If countries do match up to their initial commitments, we will still see quite a lot of that, but at a slightly slower pace. And if they take those commitments and see how easy, cheap and useful they are with a whole bunch of other co-benefits including better air quality, then we’ll see an even slower change because people will exceed what they’ve initially promised.

The D.O.: Is this the ultimate solution to climate change or does more need to be done?

G.S.: There’s no ultimate solution. There’s just slightly better decisions to be made.

There’s moves to be made on all different levels. The decisions are there to be made. And they’re not one-time decisions. They’re not something that you decide tomorrow and they’re done. They’re continuous.

The next steps are the people on the ground making decisions to do a better job than they’re doing. But there will be additional global steps as we account for all of those individual decisions that are being made. We track them and we encourage people to do more. So there will be periodic global steps to keep people informed, keep people in line and encourage people to do better, share technology, share experiences, share best practices. But all the gab fests, they’re not doing the job. The job is being done by decision makers on the ground.

So this is an agreement to make steps collectively and to keep people in the loops about the steps that you’re making so people will know that nobody’s cheating or that these things can be verified. And that gives people the confidence to make further steps themselves without feeling that it’s going to penalize them.

Published on October 10, 2016 at 11:30 pm

Contact: mpmoor02@syr.edu