Earth Day: U.S. and 170 Countries Sign Paris Climate Agreement: New at <em>Reason</em>

Dreamstime: Hannu Viitanen

This Earth Day, representatives of some 170 countries gathered at the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York to sign the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. The document, which was hammered out at the U.N.'s 21st climate change conference in Paris in December of last year, commits signatories to work toward limiting the rise of global temperatures to less than 2 degrees Celsius above their pre-industrial average, and to strive to keep the increase below 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. Some activists are denouncing that the agreement as "irresponsibly insufficient" and dismissing the signing ceremony as being merely "the global elite's theatre." Other analysts fear that the agreement will spawn a vast unaccountable bureaucratic monstrosity beholden only to climate activists and crony capitalists.

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