The climate agreement reached in Paris is provoking a flurry of caveats, criticisms and cautions. Many of those criticisms are warranted and there is a lot of work ahead to make sure countries live up to their promises. However, we should not miss a chance to celebrate a historic turning point.
World leaders finally made commitments to clean, renewable energy that will help ensure a safer, healthier and more prosperous future for us all. The agreement signals that the age of fossil fuels is coming to a close, and the age of renewable energy is dawning.
In many ways, the Paris deal is the mother of all market signals. To deliver on the promises world leaders made, we would need to leave coal and oil in the ground and move toward a complete reliance on clean energy. Let us not miss the writing on the wall: Fossil fuels are a losing bet, while renewable energy offers economic opportunity.
This is true for all segments of society — from energy investors to individual households that can save money on their energy bills by switching to rooftop solar power.
The Paris pact ratifies an ongoing renewable energy revolution spreading across the globe. Each year since 2013, the world has added more power-generating capacity fueled by renewable sources than from coal, natural gas and oil combined. Global investment in renewable energy reached US$310 billion last year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
Major companies are pledging to go 100 percent renewable, too.
Much of that growth in clean, renewable energy has come from the subnational movement, in which cities, states and regions are banding together and leading even if their national governments are lagging. This bottom-up approach — one that so many people around the world are already part of — is what was most alive about Paris.
It is what drove so many people to the COP 21 talks this year and is the driving force that makes so many hopeful. In my home state of New York, for example, we have a robust movement to ban fracking, courageously embraced by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
Across the US, whole towns, communities and cities are racing to a full reliance on renewable energy, despite the gridlock in Washington. This is where so many sense real hope coming out of Paris.
Meanwhile, cities from London to Los Angeles, from Jakarta to Rotterdam, are pioneering innovative approaches to cutting their own carbon footprints. Momentum is growing: Following the meeting, Republicans and Democrats in San Diego — the US’ eighth-largest city — unanimously agreed to transition to 100 percent clean energy.
What cities are doing, countries can also do. As my co-founder at The Solutions Project — Stanford professor Mark Jacobson — told US Congress last month, transitioning to 100 percent clean energy is not only good for the environment, human health and the economy, it is doable. His team has developed roadmaps showing exactly how 139 countries can each completely transition to renewable energy by 2050 using the technology we have right now.
The Paris climate agreement brings that vision — of a world where all people have access to 100 percent clean energy — closer to reality. Much more has to go right if nations are to fulfill their promises over the coming years. However, the wind is at our backs.
The voices of people gathered in Paris — from big-city mayors intent on making urban life better, to indigenous people and small island countries fighting for their right to live in some of Earth’s most unspoiled places — echoed hundreds of millions of voices, all around the world, demanding action.
In response to those demands, world leaders have finally agreed to steer us away from a climate disaster. This is a moment of real hope. It is a recognition, at long last, that we are all in this together.
As negotiators in Paris acknowledged, some countries would need financial help to move to renewable energy. However, the payoff for investing in them — through mechanisms such as the UN’s Green Climate Fund — will be tremendous. Just as poorer nations skipped landline telephones for mobile telephones, they can skip generations of coal-fired power plants for clean, renewable power.
In wealthy nations we benefit from the switch to renewables, too. The US has tripled wind and solar capacity since 2008, and last year, the US installed as much solar-generating capacity every three weeks as it did in all of 2008. That translates into job growth — the solar industry already employs more people than the coal industry, by some measures — as well as cleaner and healthier air.
Critics of the Paris deal are right to point out that it cannot “solve” climate change on its own. Countries would have to work hard to fulfill the promises they made last week and set even more ambitious targets in the future. In addition, the people of the world must stay engaged, doing their part to tackle climate change while holding political and economic leaders accountable.
There is much to be done. However, after years of walking in circles, Paris was a giant step in the right direction. Now the renewable energy race is on, and we need to run — not walk — to the finish line.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has offered Taiwan a paradoxical mix of reassurance and risk. Trump’s visceral hostility toward China could reinforce deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. Yet his disdain for alliances and penchant for transactional bargaining threaten to erode what Taiwan needs most: a reliable US commitment. Taiwan’s security depends less on US power than on US reliability, but Trump is undermining the latter. Deterrence without credibility is a hollow shield. Trump’s China policy in his second term has oscillated wildly between confrontation and conciliation. One day, he threatens Beijing with “massive” tariffs and calls China America’s “greatest geopolitical
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made the astonishing assertion during an interview with Germany’s Deutsche Welle, published on Friday last week, that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a dictator. She also essentially absolved Putin of blame for initiating the war in Ukraine. Commentators have since listed the reasons that Cheng’s assertion was not only absurd, but bordered on dangerous. Her claim is certainly absurd to the extent that there is no need to discuss the substance of it: It would be far more useful to assess what drove her to make the point and stick so
The central bank has launched a redesign of the New Taiwan dollar banknotes, prompting questions from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators — “Are we not promoting digital payments? Why spend NT$5 billion on a redesign?” Many assume that cash will disappear in the digital age, but they forget that it represents the ultimate trust in the system. Banknotes do not become obsolete, they do not crash, they cannot be frozen and they leave no record of transactions. They remain the cleanest means of exchange in a free society. In a fully digitized world, every purchase, donation and action leaves behind data.
Yesterday, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), once the dominant political party in Taiwan and the historic bearer of Chinese republicanism, officially crowned Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) as its chairwoman. A former advocate for Taiwanese independence turned Beijing-leaning firebrand, Cheng represents the KMT’s latest metamorphosis — not toward modernity, moderation or vision, but toward denial, distortion and decline. In an interview with Deutsche Welle that has now gone viral, Cheng declared with an unsettling confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “not a dictator,” but rather a “democratically elected leader.” She went on to lecture the German journalist that Russia had been “democratized
RSS