World Leaders Unite At Climate Change Conference In Paris

On Monday, the United Nations Conference on Climate Change kicked off in Paris, France, bringing together 150 heads of state as the largest diplomatic conference ever organized to address the issue of climate change throughout the world.

Over the next two weeks of intense negotiations, countries will brainstorm strategies to aggressively fight climate change.

President Obama has joined other world leaders in announcing the U.S.’s participation in “Mission Innovation,” which targets clean energy.

“Accelerating widespread clean energy innovation is an indispensable part of an effective, long-term global response to our shared climate challenge,” Mission Innovation published in a joint statement. “Necessary to provide affordable and reliable energy for everyone and to promote economic growth; and critical for energy security. While important progress has been made in cost reduction and deployment of clean energy technologies, the pace of innovation and the scale of transformation and dissemination remains significantly short of what is needed.”

“For these reasons,” the statement continued, “participating countries have come together to launch Mission Innovation to reinvigorate and accelerate public and private global clean energy innovation with the objective to make clean energy widely affordable.  Additional countries will be encouraged to join in the future.”

President Obama has promised that the United States will cut emissions up to 28% by 2025 and places large responsibility on the U.S. to make rapid progress, due to the U.S.’s placement as the world’s largest economy and second largest greenhouse gas emitter.

Good news: the world now adds more clean power capacity each year than dirtier fossil-fuel based power capacity. pic.twitter.com/nrNiwDAKuN

— President Obama (@POTUS44) November 29, 2015

As world leaders have come together to act, many large corporations have also pledged to address the issue of climate change.

Big news: 154 companies are calling for strong global action on climate change → https://t.co/IU2TIZKAPI #COP21 pic.twitter.com/ROh6S4pJOC

— White House Archived (@ObamaWhiteHouse) December 1, 2015

You can hear President Obama’s full COP21 speech below.

"Let that be our common purpose in Paris: A world that is worthy of our children" —@POTUS #ParisClimateConference https://t.co/5w2hTP5Cja

— White House Archived (@ObamaWhiteHouse) November 30, 2015