Less than a month after the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris, leaders from 150 nations have convened in the French capital to discuss ways to reduce the effects of climate change on a global scale. The conference is the largest gathering ever of world leaders. The goal of the historic, two-week long forum is to enact new policies that would commit nearly every country on the planet to legally binding reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
The immediacy of the effects of climate change has spurred private investors to join forces with governments. Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft, has formed a group called The Clean Energy Coalition, in coordination with the White House, to work with 19 governments and 27 other billionaires from around the world to create a public-private coalition to fund research for clean and renewable energy. “Given the scale of the challenge, we need to be exploring many different paths, and that means we also need to invent new approaches,” Gates said in a statement about the initiative. U.S. President Barack Obama joined Gates at the announcement in Paris saying, “We don’t know exactly what’s going to work best, but we know if we put our best minds behind it and put our dollars behind it, we’ll discover what works.”
The leaders of the two largest greenhouse gas emitting countries, President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping, urged the other leaders at the conference to come together to tackle an issue that will affect everyone for generations to come. Citing Martin Luther King Jr., Obama warned, “there is such a thing as being too late.”
Major opponents of climate regulations are developing countries, such as India, who do not feel their development and economic growth should be constrained in order to fix the problems created by developed nations. India and other less developed countries are being pressured to cut back on their increasing investment in coal fueled electricity to provide power to their citizens.
There is also concern that developing nations, who contributed little to the overall climate problem, will be the first to feel the effects. Water insecurity, forced migrations, and rising sea levels will all be felt most immediately in less developed and island nations. For this reason, 11 countries, including the United States, plan to establish a Less Developed Countries Fund of $248 million to support these countries as they fight off the effects of climate change.
President Obama has sought to put climate change at the forefront of his agenda, evidenced by his trip this August to Alaska—a U.S. state that is already feeling the negative effects of climate change. Increasing temperatures, melting glaciers, sea ice and permafrost, and rising sea levels are linked to the recent warming in the Arctic region.
Many see climate change as a potential uniting force for the international community. Countries such as China, Russia, and the U.S., who often take contrary views on global issues, will all suffer from the effects of global warming. Climate change may be the common adversary needed to unite diverse countries across the globe.
Could this cooperative effort be the foundation for tackling another one of the world’s intractable adversaries: ISIS? President Obama took the opportunity at the climate change conference to hold separate meetings with individual leaders to discuss the scourge of ISIS and how best to respond to terrorism. Obama called the international gathering in Paris just weeks after the terrorist attacks as “an act of defiance,” and added, “What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world than marshaling our best efforts to save it?”
