Argumentative Essay: Should Climate Change Laws Be Reformed?

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Should Climate Change Laws be Reformed?
Climate change is a hot topic all around the world. Hundreds of thousands of articles, graphs, charts, and videos have been created about climate change, and thousands of people have voiced their opinions on it through speeches and social media. It has been such a prominent issue for a few decades now, and many different laws have been placed into effect to help prevent it’s disastrous effects. But are these laws effective, and should they be reformed? The rising temperatures and high CO2 levels in our atmosphere are more than enough evidence to prove that the current laws in place that are supposed to help fight climate change are ineffective and should be reformed.
Although there are laws already …show more content…

The Kyoto Protocol is one of the laws the US has in place to help limit greenhouse gas emissions. But this law is not enforced well enough to make significant change. Countries who are forced to apply this protocol will just find loopholes that make the law pointless. James E. Hansen, a well known climate scientist, said, "So, for example, in the Kyoto Protocol, that was very ineffective. Even the countries that took on supposedly the strongest requirements, like Japan for example—if you look at its actual emissions, its actual fossil fuel use, you see that their CO2 emissions actually increased even though they were supposed to decrease. Because their coal use increased...we’ll realize 10 years later, oops, it really didn’t do much." Hansen has a very good point- the current laws are very easy to cheat. If Japan, one of the biggest GHG producers, can so easily go around the law, other countries can do so just as easily. Another example is the Paris Agreement. Recently, the US withdrew from the agreement. The US can do this easily, without any penalties, even though it is the second biggest provider of GHG in the world. “Since the agreement itself is non-binding, nothing would actually happen to the U.S. in terms of official consequences” (Zorthian, 2017) Because of this, any progress that has been made to help stop climate change is thrown away. Laws should be reformed so that all countries are required to help, even if only a little, to help the

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