News24com Barack Obama takes aim at Russia China as he tells COP26 world is nowhere near fighting climate change
Former US President Barack Obama waves as he walks to a session during the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference.
Paul ELLIS / AFP
Former US president Barack Obama said on Monday that the bad news for United Nations climate talks was that the world was nowhere near where it needed to be on tackling global warming yet.
Referring to the Paris Agreement struck in 2015, Obama told the COP26 summit in Glasgow: "So Paris showed the world that progress is possible and created a framework, important work was done there and important work has been done here. That is the good news."
"Now for the bad news. We are nowhere near where we need to be."
Obama also lambasted those who would play politics to avoid acting on climate change, calling out Russia and China in the same breath as Republican politicians back home.
"It was particularly discouraging to see the leaders of two of the world's largest emitters, China and Russia, declined to even attend the proceedings" in Glasgow, Obama said.
READ | At COP26 talks, 45 nations pledge to protect nature in climate change fight
Their "national plans so far reflect what appears to be a dangerous lack of urgency and willingness to maintain the status quo on the part of those governments, and that's a shame."
The Democratic former president also took aim at domestic lawmakers from the Republican Party.
Obama said both he and current Democratic President Joe Biden had been "constrained in large part by the fact that one of our two major parties has decided not only to sit on the sidelines but express active hostility toward climate science and make climate change a partisan issue."
Obama also spoke about island nations, saying heir tales at the 2015 climate talks had been crucial to the resulting Paris Agreement, which commits countries to holding the rise in the average global temperature to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
"I have been shaped by my experience growing up in Hawaii," Obama said, adding: "we have to act now to help with adaptation and resilience".
Other speakers at the COP26 summit pressed Obama about the failure of the United States and other Western countries to meet pledges to provide $100 billion a year in climate finance.
"Among others, the USA is woefully short of paying its fair share of climate finance," said Fiji's Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, adding: "Now we are most vulnerable are told to suck it up and wait."
"Developed nations are failing us," Bainimarama said.
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