Chino City, Japan, Dec. 17, 2019—Sometime this week, more than 180 states representing nearly 90 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions are expected to agree at a Madrid, Spain meeting on nitty-gritty details of climate change mitigation, the regime worked out as the Paris Agreement.
Conspicuously absent at what is known as the COP25 conference (25th conference of parties) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the United States save a few from the U.S. administration virtually as observers,as well as representatives of U.S. states and businesses, according to reports from Madrid.
Washington announced its intention from the Paris Agreement (COP21) known at the instruction of president Trump in 2017. In November 2019, Washington submitted its formal intention to pull out. But withdrawal cannot be made before November 4, 2020, days before the U.S. presidential election. The COP25 conference was scheduled for Chile but due to unrest in the country, it is being held in Madrid.
The Madrid meeting is being extended beyond the final day of Dec. 13 because of differences on climate change mitigation policies, notably on market mechanisms, between developed and developing states, such as the European Union and India, according to news reports from Madrid.
Brazil, China and India are demanding that emission credits recognized before 2019 be included in the Paris Agreement scheduled to take effect in January 2020. A majority of other COP21 signatories are objecting to the demand, according to the reports.
The signatories also are divided about the UNFCCC proposal to submit their respective 2030 GHG reduction targets by February 2020, the reports said.
Reports coming out of Madrid are devoid of references to the United States and The Prospect’s random checking of U.S. news entities also showed hardly any articles from Spain, excluding some international editions such as ones of CNN and Reuters – which is hardly a surprise given that the U.S. media attention is fixated on the Trump impeachment and little else. And most Americans do not seem to care about what’s happening in the rest of the world.
I’s not a healthy development. Scoundrels know how to seize on opportunities when their enemies are busy fighting against their home ground nemesis. China and Russia are in hegemony modes giving deaf ears to U.S. criticisms of human rights abuse against the millions of Uighurs and Hong Kong democracy protestors and Russia’s moves in the Middle East as well as its refusal to return four Japanese northern islands. Myanmar also is committing continuing atrocities against the Muslim Rohingyas. China also is rapidly expanding into the South China Sea and Japanese defense experts (retired) have said that China may take control of the disputed Senkaku Island in the East China Sea. Against most of those developments, Trump barks like a whining Afghan dog and can do hardly anything else, except building the walls between the U.S. and Mexico.
So clearly, the United States is becoming a visible inward-looking country and the move may become even more pronounced when Trump gets a second term next year.
–Toshio Aritake