US President Barack Obama began by promising to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions 26-28% below 2005 levels by the 2025. Chinese president Xi Jinping took the next small, but important, step of agreeing to stop China’s emissions from growing by 2030 at the latest.
Although this isn’t the end-all solution to climate and environmental problems, it demonstrates an increasing international awareness of our growing ecological footprint.
China already produces 1/4 of the world’s CO2 emissions (which are more harmful than they sound), and has only recently started to begin applying policy to do reduce its extreme air pollution (which is so bad that people are importing bags of air from the mountains).
What Obama offers is more concrete, and it is a step in the right direction. One can only hope that China takes measures to reduce its impact on the enviroment, especially as mounting environmental stress threatens to force a biosphere state shift (which we can more effectively express as environmental collapse).
Unfortunately, Obama cannot guarentee to make this promise come true beyond his term, which ends in 2017. It may be wise to concentrate on raising awareness and promoting activism, instead of counting on politicians on doing anything other than following their best interests. After all, what we do inspires others to do the same.
This is hopefully one of many small, but important steps, towards us living within our means on this planet, and taking responsibility for our behavior.