China ratifies Paris climate agreement before G20 summit

A history of heavy dependence on burning
coal for energy has made China the source
of nearly a third of the world's
  total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

China has announced its ratification of the Paris climate change agreement, paving the way for a hotly anticipated joint US-China statement on the fight against global warming later on Saturday.

In a brief dispatch on Saturday morning, China’s official news agency, Xinhua, said members of the country’s rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress, had voted “to review and ratify” the historic deal.

The announcement comes as Xi Jinping and Barack Obama are expected to meet in China ahead of the start of the G20 on Sunday to make a joint statement on climate change.

Activists believe the centrepiece of that statement, which Chinese and American officials have spent weeks negotiating, will be a formal commitment by both countries to ratify the deal.

The Paris agreement, sealed last December after two weeks of intense negotiations, needs to be ratified by 55 countries, representing 55% of global emissions, in order to come into effect.

Read The Guardian story - “China ratifies Paris climate change agreement ahead of G20.”

(It’s contrary to the extreme to be critical of the Paris climate agreement, but it has the potential to bring on complacency among the world community as people gleefully rub their hands together and think “job done” and so back-off on climate mitigation and relax about carbon dioxide emissions reductions, when the Paris pact was really little more than the first step. What happened in Paris was cause for celebration and jubilation, but it was little more than the world community simply saying, “Yes, climate change is real and it is important for humanity that we act to address it”. Sadly, the terms for addressing it are inadequate by a factor of about 10, or even more, for not only does the world need to slow and stop emissions, it needs to throw them into reverse, that is actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and that, as yet, is little more than an untried theory. Paris was positive, yet, but simply just the first step in a convoluted and challenging journey – Robert McLean).