Today we're going to talk about how we are doing on reaching the ultimate goal of the Paris Agreement

and how we can prevent politics from getting in the way of the real economy. Hello and I'm Paul de Kannock. I'm Christina Figuettes.

And I'm Paul dekinsen.

Today we examine what it will take for countries to increase their commitment to climate action

under the Paris Agreement.

We dig into the politics of who in the age of Trump can lead the world to get back on track.

And we talk to Ben Rhodes, former Deputy National Security

Advisor under President Obama, co-host of Pod Save the World and author of the world

as it is. Thanks for being here. So today we're going to dig into

the international politics of climate change and we're going to start with an apparent contradiction at the

heart of the Paris Agreement. How can the agreement both have a target to keep us

on 1.5 degrees and zero emissions by 2050 and simultaneously be insufficient and

leading us to over three degrees. So can I try to explain that? Do it. I'm going to try I think it's the same situation that you have if you are

running a marathon and you say right a full marathon is 26 miles or 42 kilometers, and that is the full extent of the marathon.

Now, not everybody runs from mile 0 to 26 in one second. They usually go through a periodic or a

gradual attainment of the marathon distance, right? So that's what the Paris agreement does. It says we're going to run the full

marathon but we know that we're going to run it mile by mile or in this case

five miles by five miles. So the Paris Agreement says eventually we're going to

be at zero net emissions by 2050 but we know that we're not going to get there

overnight so every five years we're going to clock in and countries are going to come together

and say how much more they can do with respect to where they were previously.

So it's like saying that, you know, we know what the end point is in 2050,

...