In what he called a "powerful rebuke" to ISIS terrorists, President Obama is in Paris today for the COP21 summit on climate change.
The meeting goes by several names - the United Nations Climate Summit, the 2015 Paris Climate Conference, or COP21, which stands for the 21st meeting of the Conference of Parties that are part of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change. The first COP meeting took place in Berlin in 1995, and the most famous of these was COP3, which resulted in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
A 2009 conference in Copenhagen failed to produce a meaningful agreement, so world leaders are trying again to jumpstart the negotiations.
About 150 world leaders and than more than 40,000 delegates representing 195 countries will attend the conference in Paris.
Naturally, Obama flew to the summit in Air Force One, which burns approximately five gallons of jet fuel per mile at a cost of more than $200,000 per hour. The trip will leave nearly 100 tons of carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere.
Looks super friendly to the environment #ClimateChangeIsReal https://t.co/pUxnbJbKHe
— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) November 29, 2015Air Force One kicks up spray as it takes off on 7 hour flight to Paris. pic.twitter.com/fUd8bvJlcL
— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) November 29, 2015Obama, who left the United States yesterday, has a series of meetings planned with a number of different leaders from around the world. Despite a number of scientists remaining skeptical about the science behind climate change and a series of scandals involving the cooking of numbers to "prove" global warming over the years, as far as we can tell climate change skeptics were not invited to the summit to offer a different point of view.
I should also note that golfing is President Obama's favorite past time, which of course is not an environmentally friendly activity.