U.S. Climate Curbing Pledges Inadequate, Study Says

Posted on Nov 30, 2012

olga.palma (CC BY 2.0)

Despite climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing’s insistence that the U.S. deserves credit for its “enormous” efforts to stall global warming and help poor countries prepare for it, a scientific scorecard showed that the opposite is true.

The Climate Action Tracker report issued Friday during negotiations in Doha, Qatar, said the U.S. has failed to carry out even its weak pledge to limit carbon emissions. China, the European Union and Russia also received “inadequate” ratings for their plans to limit the rise in global temperature to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

All national pledges and the expected rise in emissions put the world on track for a warming of 6 degrees Fahrenheit, the report said.

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

Reuters:

“We are off track and the United States is not likely to meet its pledge,” said Niklas Hoehne of research group Ecofys, which compiles the tracker with Climate Analytics and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

He told Reuters that the other top emitters were on course at least to meet their promised curbs in emissions by 2020 as part of efforts to avert severe change that would disrupt water and food supplies.

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