Politicizing the Environmental Debate, 2000–2017 283
that’s being locked in today won’t be fully felt
until today’s toddlers reach middle age. In effect,
we are living in the climate of the past, but
already we’ve determined the climate’s future.
Global warming’s back-loaded temporality
makes all the warnings—from scientists, gov-
ernment agencies, and, especially, journalists—
seem hysterical, Cassandra-like—Ototototoi!—
even when they are understated. Once feedbacks
take over, the climate can change quickly, and it
can change radically. At the end of the last ice
age, during an event known as meltwater pulse
1A, sea levels rose at the rate of more than a foot
a decade. It’s likely that the “floodgates” are
already open, and that large sections of Green-
land and Antarctica are fated to melt. It’s just
the ice in front of us that’s still frozen.Source: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/24
Greenland-Is-Melting, by Elizabeth Kolbert.Now they’re everywhere—in the flooded streets
of Florida and South Carolina, in the beetle-
infested forests of Colorado and Montana, in
the too warm waters of the Mid-Atlantic and
the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, in the
mounds of dead mussels that washed up this
summer on the coast of Long Island and the
piles of dead fish that coated the banks of the
Yellowstone River.
But the problem with global warming—and
the reason it continues to resist illustration, even
as the streets flood and the forests die and the
mussels rot on the shores—is that experience
is an inadequate guide to what’s going on. The
climate operates on a time delay. When carbon
dioxide is added to the atmosphere, it takes dec-
ades—in a technical sense, millennia—for the
earth to equilibrate. This summer’s fish kill was
a product of warming that had become inevita-
ble twenty or thirty years ago, and the warming
Document 185: The G20 Responds to the U.S. Withdrawal from the
Paris Accords (2017)The Paris Agreement, adopted on December 12, 2015, at a session of the Conference of the Parties to the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) created a global plan of action designed to
prevent disastrous climate change. In late 2016 the United States, under President Obama, became a party to the
agreement, but just a few months later Donald Trump withdrew the United States from it. In July 2017 the G20
(a group made up of the 20 leading economies in the world) reacted to Trump’s action by developing a blueprint
outlining how their nations could reach the pact’s goals, declaring that the agreement is irreversible, and leaving
the United States visibly isolated.Economic growth, sustainable development
and prosperity are at the heart of G20 coopera-
tion. They rely on universal access to affordable,
reliable, sustainable energy sources and clean
technologies. The leaders of G20 members will
continually develop their economies and energy
systems to better reflect the evolution of the
global energy and environmental landscape. To
facilitate the implementation of UNFCCC, the
Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sus-
tainable Development, we will strive to move
forward in a coherent and mutually supportive
manner that will provide us with significant
opportunities for modernising our economies,
enhancing competitiveness, stimulating employ-
ment and growth and ensuring socio-economic
benefits of increased energy access. In addition,
and in view of the increasing impacts of climate
change, we will strive to increase the resilience of
our communities and economies.
Our action will be guided by the Sustain-
able Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris
Agreement’s aim to strengthen the global
response to the threat of climate change, in