{"id":560,"date":"2018-12-04T01:02:12","date_gmt":"2018-12-04T01:02:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/?p=560"},"modified":"2022-03-09T21:39:18","modified_gmt":"2022-03-09T21:39:18","slug":"opening-plenaries-cant-believe-were-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/2018\/12\/04\/opening-plenaries-cant-believe-were-here\/","title":{"rendered":"Opening Plenaries!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>All of us students started out our day attending the COP24 opening ceremony, in which the Polish president, the mayor of Katowice, the leader of the World Bank, the prime minister of Fiji, and other high level officials spoke to the importance of COP24 and what it needs to accomplish.\u00a0 The opening plenaries made clear the main goals of COP24: to create a rule book for implementing the Paris Agreement and to ramp up climate action efforts. Many leaders cited the IPCC report as evidence that climate action efforts need to be taken seriously.<\/p>\n<p>The President of the World Bank made some bold commitments in their opening speech, such as including climate change as a factor in all of their decision making, implementing a shadow price on carbon, and doubling their budget toward mitigating climate change. I was surprised that there didn&#8217;t seem to be a huge initial reaction to these commitments, so I&#8217;m hoping to hear more about them throughout the conference.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/IMG_5319.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-562\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-562\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/IMG_5319-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"IMG_5319\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/IMG_5319-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/IMG_5319-768x576.jpg 768w, https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/IMG_5319-1024x768.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>(Executive Officer of the World Bank,\u00a0Kristalina Georgieva.)<\/p>\n<p>The president of Poland also used the opening plenaries as an opportunity to share what Poland has been doing to combat climate change and why Katowice is a great city to host COP24. He explained how the conference center where COP24 is being held is in the same site as a shut down coal mine. Amos, Shauna, Marianne, and I debated whether or not the Polish President&#8217;s argument was convincing, as he did make a good case for how Poland has been reducing emissions. Still, many of these reductions have still come from a supposedly &#8216;cleaner&#8217; coal, and many climate activists would agree that clean coal is not really possible.<\/p>\n<p>The opening plenaries raised many issues I can&#8217;t wait to follow throughout the conference!<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/IMG_5429.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-563\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-563\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/IMG_5429-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"IMG_5429\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/IMG_5429-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/IMG_5429-768x576.jpg 768w, https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/IMG_5429-1024x768.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>(President of Poland,\u00a0Andrzej Duda.)<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>All of us students started out our day attending the COP24 opening ceremony, in which the Polish president, the mayor of Katowice, the leader of the World Bank, the prime minister of Fiji, and other high level officials spoke to the importance of COP24 and what it needs to accomplish.\u00a0 The opening plenaries made clear &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/2018\/12\/04\/opening-plenaries-cant-believe-were-here\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Opening Plenaries!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=560"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":568,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560\/revisions\/568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/cop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}