Paris deal a voluntary effort: Kerry

The historic agreement on Climate change reached in Paris by more than 180 countries is a voluntary effort that came with a transparent mechanism and does need a Congressional approval for the US, Secretary of State John Kerry said today.
"There's mandatory reporting. There is a universal system by which every country, all 186, each of whom have submitted an independent plan, have to report on what they're doing, what their emissions are, on the total carbon print," Kerry said in an interview to the Fox News.
"And that reporting will be used by one country to measure against another and it will be a great way of exchanging information about technologies, about approaches," he said.

Noting that this sends a very powerful message to the marketplace, Kerry said one of the reasons why there's no enforcement mechanism is because the US Congress would never accept one.
"So it has to be voluntary. And a lot of nations resent that, but we have accepted that, because we believe it's going to move the marketplace, and already you see countless new technologies, a lot of jobs being created," he said in response to a question.
Kerry said the US President Barack Obama was determined to get an agreement here that would move the world in the right direction.

"The President has taken enormous initiative in order to move us to engage with other countries, including China, and bring them to the table. Some countries, simply wouldn't accept the mandatory mechanism. We among them," he said.

"So the best thing we can do in an effort to try to change people's thinking, is to do this mandatory reporting requirement. And the mandatory reporting requirement has to be updated every five years," he said.
Every five years, it is mandatory that countries retool their reduction levels in order to meet the demands of meeting the curve of reduction to which they have committed.

"So that is a serious form of enforcement of compliance, but there is no penalty for it, obviously. But if there had been a penalty, we wouldn't have been able to get an agreement," the top American diplomat said.
"So we did the best we could to set the world on a new course towards energy independence, alternative renewable energy, towards a lower carbon footprint, greater health, greater security," he said.
The US President deserves enormous credit for his outreach to China, putting the two largest emitters and the two largest economies together to set an example to the world, he said.

"I very much doubt we would have had an agreement at all if President Obama hadn't initiated the effort with China and undertaken his own climate action plan in the US, which has now seen the US reduce our emissions more than any other country in the world," Kerry said.