Obama and The World

The final coverage of Obama's climate change plan covers his approach to climate change in an international standing. After Bush and the republican era, Obama provides a refreshing change as a President openly accepting the problem of climate change and this is showing on the international front.

Source: Antiques

Obama as effectively the most powerful man on the planet is keen to lead international efforts in combating climate change. Some of the progress Obama has made is summarised in the following bullet points... 

• Obama has put forward an initiative in the attempt to stop the financing of new coal fired power plants overseas (except in exceptional circumstances). Following the world leader, other countries including the UK have also signed this initiative.
• As previously blogged about Obama is working with other major carbon emitting countries such as China and India to attempt to team up and combat the issue starting with changes in vehicle emissions and clean energy.
• The USA leads the Climate and Clean Air coalition that now includes 39 countries - it is working to introduce policy in a ten step program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
• The US, UK and Norway have joined together to support forests in developing countries with the aim of supporting sustainable agriculture and reducing emissions from deforestation.
• The plan to reduce tariffs on a variety of products protected under the World Trade Organisation was proposed in 2014 by a group of countries representative of 86% of environmental goods in global trade - America was a large part of this.
• 2015 is set to bring a new climate agreement and we can hope Obama plays in integral role in this
• The US, UK and Germany have launched the Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance, with the aim of inspiring major investments in 'low-carbon, resilient infrastructure' particularly in developing countries. (Whitehouse, 2014)

Thus concludes the points that the Whitehouse have highlighted on their blog as major changes, only time will tell how many of these initiatives and decisions will be successful. It's the attitudes of the american people that need to change. The one in four americans that still don't believe global warming is because of human influence needs to be changed and hopefully the support from the president that the issue has will help this. (Gallup, 2014) It's a start at least, Obama is pushing for change and the environment does seem to be something he cares about - which is promising for the future!