Paris - A Waste Of Time Or A Way Forward? Essay

We recently watched the film Paris is Burning, a documentary about black drag queens in Harlem and their culture surrounding balls. Directly related we also read two feminist critiques, Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion by Judith Butler and Is Paris Burning by bell hooks. Two areas of critique I focus on and question are the critiques regarding the filmmaker, audience and drag queens and how they participate to reinforce a heterosexual racist patriarchy. Furthermore I ask if this line of investigation is the most beneficial way to view and understand the film and its various participants.

The UNFCCC is working with the various governments around the world to stabilize the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere to keep the planet from warming more than 2ºC above pre-industrial temperatures (Watts, 2015). The most noted of the work is the annual Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings that began with COP1 in Berlin back in 1995. The COP3 adopted the Kyoto Protocol, even though it wasn’t fully accepted by all member nations. The COP21 was an effort to legally bind members to their submitted plans of Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), defining what level of greenhouse gas production each nation would commit to not exceeding from 2025-2030. Prior to the INDCs, a bleak outlook was forecast in 2009-2010 of global temperature rising between 4-5ºC. That figure was restated by the UNFCCC prior to the COP21 in Paris, to below 3ºC, due to the commitments of the INDCs (Watts, 2015).

Climate change has become a major issue in global environmental politics as it has been shown to have a correlation with issues such as deforestation, biodiversity loss, and desertification. As Chapter 45 states “The 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found consensus in the scientific community that greenhouse gas emissions have significantly increased because of human activity and, further, that the modest temperature increases we have already experienced are “very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.” Due to this report awareness was brought to almost everyone of how serious human activity was to the global climate. In 2009, it was declared that “If global warming is to be limited to a maximum of two degrees C. above preindustrial values, global emissions need to peak between 2015 and 2020 and then decline rapidly”. To me this sounds foreboding and it is something that deserves our full attention immediately. To try and get a better understanding of how serious climate change is, I’m going to try and interpret chapter 45 which deals on climate change through 5 different paradigms of International Relations.

Paris is Burning is a documentary about the ‘ballroom culture’ of LGBT and black cultures. It was shot in the mid-80s in New York, but it was released 1990. Through the film and the characters, many aspects of this culture are explored. Things like ‘realness’, ‘balls’, and the different concept of ‘family’ that the members of this community have, allows us to see and learn more about the drag community and what is like to see the world through their eyes. Besides all of these aspects, the film main focus is gender identity, theme that has also bring about many opinions about what gender is and what does it mean to be a woman. Some of the questions that the film has raised are if to be a woman is to be born like one or is just to look like one.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) aspires to “stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that will prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system.” The Paris Agreement, created under the UNFCCC, helps make that goal a reality. Signed by Canada on Earth Day 2016, the agreement “requires all Parties to put forward their best efforts through ‘nationally determined contributions’ (NDCs) and to strengthen these efforts in the years ahead. This includes requirements that all Parties report regularly on their emissions and on their implementation efforts. There will also be a global stocktake every 5 years to assess the collective progress towards achieving the purpose of the agreement and to inform further individual actions by Parties.” As of 5 November 2016, ninety-seven parties out of one hundred ninety-seven have signed the agreement that went into effect on 4 November 2016. Canada’s involvement in the UNFCCC and the Paris agreement is just the tip of the iceberg, and it is quite a contribution to global efforts to reduce climate change.

Musical film is a genre of movie, which include singing as an important aspect of the plot, and also involves dance numbers done by the characters. Move musicals usually depict a utopian society in which people express their thoughts through song, and emotions through dance. Over time, it has changed with music genre, staging, and plots. The styles have expanded into hip-hop, pop, and swing music, all represented on current Broadway shows. The staging has become more diverse and varied, with the onset of new technology, for example, Hamilton for amazing, (Tony) award winning lighting, choreography, and orchestrations.

No, I believe that the U.S. shouldn’t be responsible for helping ISIS. I wouldn’t like to see or hear innocent people get hurt. Also it’s not the United States responsibility for the fight that ISIS picked with Paris. It would be nice for the Unites States to help ISIS but the problem between ISIS and Paris would become bigger if the United States came in because than that would mean that Paris would want to bring someone in the back them up as well. It think that both sides would create their own big army and that would create something extremely big a dangerous for a lot of people.

The climate change impacts of greenhouse gases threaten the economic development and environmental quality. These threats indicate that all nations regardless their economic growth should work collaboratively to reduce the emission to a certain level. Hare et al. (2011) argued that “climate change is a collective action problem” thus requires a global coordination from all countries. This indicates that actions from several countries would never be sufficient to address the climate change problem. If a global target to limit warming to 2°C or below is about to achieve (UNFCCC 2010, p.4) a broad range of participation is required (Hare et al., 2011). However, the increasing complexity of negotiation processes is inevitable. Each country will pursue its own interests during the

Naturally the capitalistic world that we live in breeds competition, in turn leading to powerful private interests. This has resulted in powerful industrial partnerships with political figures. In order to bring our society forward, we must act for change to encourage modernization, overcoming the stacked odds. The only way to influence our country’s dependency on carbon-based energy is to make way for environmental advocates at all levels of policy. The Paris Climate Change efforts have us headed in the right direction, even though they hold no legal international clout. Individual countries are held responsible through the social pressures created by groups like the UNFCC, along with renewable industrial interests, has led to country social responsibility. Country social responsibility has been promoted by voluntary climate efforts, which resulted in ambitious goals, allowing countries to claim leadership on a global issue. Our efforts would ideally result in net-zero emissions in developed and developing countries alike by 2050. The technology is available, but modernization has a social aspect as well. This is essential to promote environmental policy, in order to pressure industrial powers. We can only be successful if we change our current social patterns into virtuous environmental forms.

According to an article focused on environmental awareness, “the world’s average surface temperature rose by approximately 1 degree Fahrenheit, the fastest rate in any period over the last 1000 years” (Source A). Damage has already been done to the environment but it is not the time to throw our hands up, it is the time for leaders in all sectors to tackle this issue head on. We know that carbon dioxide is the culprit, so now it is imperative to implement the solution and take a hard look at who is producing the most greenhouse gases. Big changes need to take place but they can only be done in steps and not all at once to be effective. In an excerpt from a book about global warming, Mark Maslin brings up the point that many feel the Kyoto Protocol does not go far enough; scientists believe that a 60% cut of greenhouse gas emissions is necessary in order to “prevent major climate change” (Source E). A sixty percent cut of emissions should be what countries work up to achieving but first and foremost, every country needs to agree to the Kyoto Protocol guidelines. The Kyoto Protocol itself should not be viewed as the end in the discussion of greenhouse gas restrictions, but rather the first stepping stone to a much broader and effective

Last week at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Ms. Christiana Figueres, the charismatic Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) since 2010, gave a talk highlighting the great outcome presented at COP21 meeting last December in Paris. She referred to the

On December 12 of 2015, 195 countries made history by committing to the first truly global international climate change agreement (Paris Agreement, 2015). This agreement took place in Paris and was adopted under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The outcome of the Paris Conference on Climate Change was described as “revolutionary” (Venezuela) “marvelous act” (China) and as “a tremendous collective achievement” (European Union) that introduced a “new era of global climate governance” (Egypt) while “restoring the global community’s faith of accomplishing things multilaterally” (USA) (Paris Agreement, 2015).

Implementing Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions reduction policies is motivated by the occurrence of climate change and its projected damage to world economies, ecosystems and communities. Climate change is becoming increasingly urgent in the world sphere with its main cause being observed anthropogenic and thus certain mitigation and adaptation policies must be put in place to attempt to slow the current rate of warming and allow world economies to adapt to the already inevitable effects (Stern, 2006). The targets outlined in the Stern Review require an ideal abatement resulting in stabilised CO2 levels of 450 parts per million (ppm), which requires stronger mitigation on

The 2014 Climate Summit was completed in order to address the global issue of climate change and how all nations as a whole need to address the anthropogenic causes. The use of fossil fuels as an energy source is the major cause of the CO_2 emissions into the atmosphere. Figure 1 below shows the “World per Capita Carbon Emissions from Fossil Fuels from 1980-2010 and it can be clearly seen how the developed nations have released more carbon into the atmosphere than the developing nations” (1). Figure 2 below shows the “cumulative CO_2 emissions from 1900-2010, where about three quarters of CO_2 that has been released into the atmosphere is from the developed nations” (1). This illustrates that the global issues that we are facing now are almost completely caused by the developed nations. For this reason it is observed, by all nations, that there are common but differentiated responsibilities when it comes to this issue since some nations are much more developed than others and have contributed to the majority of greenhouse gas emissions from 1900-2010. The reasoning for this climate summit is that without any changes being made to how the developed nations continue to use conventional energy sources and how the

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is defined under the Kyoto Protocol to enable industrialized countries meet binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets through the implementation of emission reduction projects in developing countries, while contributing to sustainable development in these developing countries at the same time. Growing scientific evidence of anthropogenic interference in the world climate system and the ubiquitous civic concern about the environment in mid 1980s necessitated the establishment of science expert-led Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tasked to assessing the state of scientific knowledge concerning climate change, evaluating its potential environmental and socio-economic impacts and