Every year the world meets for the U.N. Climate Change Conference. It's as big as the VMAs – and just as controversial.
Last week's meeting in Lima, Peru, had one simple goal: to stop the planet getting 2 degrees hotter.
Why 2 degrees? Any more will unleash a Climapocalypse of droughts, floods, hurricanes, mass food shortages, and extinctions. It might also cause "runaway climate change" (you don't want to know).
The good news? For the first time ALL countries agreed to start cutting emissions of gases that warm the planet. Some said the summit would be a total fail, so this was a nice save.
The bad news? Countries don't have to say how they're counting emissions, making it hard to know what they're cutting. If you liked it, then you should have put measurable targets on it.
What's more, the U.N. isn't going to take a close look at what everyone is promising to cut, so nobody is accountable.
And rich countries have only pledged a fraction of the money that poor countries need to adapt to climate change. There's a $100 billion climate fund being planned — but it's more fantasy than reality.
Everyone meets next year in Paris to sign the new agreement, which starts in 2020. But critics say the draft has been so watered down that it's not making any real progress.
This means the world will definitely get over 2 degrees hotter – and maybe a LOT hotter, destroying life on earth as we know it. Oops.
Environment groups say we need to stop relying on powerful people in suits to fix things and do it ourselves, which is more fun anyway.
For example, by stopping investment in coal, oil, and gas companies – known as divestment – to show them who actually run the world.
Nearly everyone agrees on one thing: If we care about the planet, we must drop our reliance on fossil fuels.
Whatever happens, it's important to stay flawlessly fierce...
