Former United States President Barack Obama on Monday targeted China and Russia for a ‘dangerous lack of urgency’ in cutting their climate emissions.
Chinese president Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin skipped the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) which is being held in Glasgow, Scotland.
Addressing the conference on Monday, Barack Obama said, “It was particularly discouraging to see the leaders of two of the world’s largest emitters, China and Russia, decline to even attend the proceedings, and their national plans reflect what appears to be a dangerous lack of urgency.”
This was Obama’s first appearance after he, among other global leaders, paved the way for the 2015 Paris climate deal. One of the long term objectives of the deal is to cut fossil fuel and agricultural emissions to keep the Earth’s warming below catastrophic levels of 1.5 degrees Celsius.
China, along with 77 other developing countries, has said that talks during the COP26 cannot be regarded as successful until the conference produces finances to help poor countries.
During the conference on Monday, Barack Obama also took a dig at former US President Donald Trump for pulling out of the Paris climate deal and for four years of active hostility towards climate science, according to a report by CNN.
While current US President Joe Biden has put America back in the climate deal, Obama said Biden wants to do more but he is limited by politics in Congress.
“Both of us have 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 said during the conference, the CNN report added.
Pointing out that optimism and unity are needed to save the planet, Obama said, “It doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or a Democrat if your Florida house is flooded by rising seas, or your crops fail in the Dakotas, or your California house is burning. Nature, physics, science – they don’t care about party affiliation,”
Apart from expressing his views at the COP26, Obama spoke to a session on Pacific island nations and also held a meeting with several climate activists. He urged these activists, many of them in their 20s, to keep up public pressure despite resentment from the inaction of governments.