UN Climate Change Summit: DiCaprio Calls For Action As World Works Towards 2015 Agreement

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Best known as a leading man for several Hollywood blockbusters, actor Leonardo DiCaprio assumed a new role on Tuesday as he addressed world leaders on the topic of global warming at the 2014 UN Climate Change Summit in New York on Tuesday.
“As an actor I pretend for a living. I play fictitious characters often solving fictitious problems,” he said at the event, according to a transcript of the speech published online by UK newspaper The Guardian. “I believe humankind has looked at climate change in that same way: as if it were a fiction, happening to someone else’s planet, as if pretending that climate change wasn’t real would somehow make it go away.”
“But I think we know better than that. Every week, we’re seeing new and undeniable climate events, evidence that accelerated climate change is here now. We know that droughts are intensifying, our oceans are warming and acidifying, with methane plumes rising up from beneath the ocean floor. We are seeing extreme weather events, increased temperatures, and the West Antarctic and Greenland ice-sheets melting at unprecedented rates, decades ahead of scientific projections,” he added. “None of this is rhetoric, and none of it is hysteria. It is fact.”

DiCaprio, who earlier this month was appointed as a UN Messenger of Peace by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in order to work as an advocate for climate change related issues, established a foundation in 1998 designed to help promote the last wild places on Earth and create a more harmonious relationship between nature and mankind.
According to the Huffington Post, the actor said that the issue of global warming had “grown beyond the choices that individuals make” and that “decisive, large-scale action” was required to tackle the problem at a government and industrial level. He went on to state that renewable energy was “not only achievable but good economic policy” and that recent scientific studies had indicated clean, renewable energy could supply the entire planet with energy by 2050.
“I am not a scientist, but I don’t need to be. Because the world’s scientific community has spoken, and they have given us our prognosis, if we do not act together, we will surely perish,” DiCaprio said. “Now is our moment for action. We need to put a pricetag on carbon emissions, and eliminate government subsidies for coal, gas, and oil companies. We need to end the free ride that industrial polluters have been given in the name of a free-market economy, they don’t deserve our tax dollars, they deserve our scrutiny.”
DiCaprio, who Frank Pallotta of CNN Money said documented the summit in photos through his Instagram account, was among those who participated in the People’s Climate March in New York on Sunday. He was joined by fellow actors Mark Ruffalo, Evangeline Lilly and Edward Norton, as well as more than 100,000 public officials, scientists, students and activists, according to Variety.com news editor Alex Stedman.
Tuesday’s one-day climate summit involved over 100 world leaders, who met with the hopes of laying the foundation for a new global treaty to address the issue of global warming next December, according to the Associated Press (AP). It also revealed the sharp divide which exists between different countries on key issues such as deforestation, carbon pollution and methane leaks from oil and gas production, the wire service added.
During the event, the European Union (EU) announced that its member nations would cut greenhouse gases so that by 2030 they would be 40 percent below the 1990 level, the AP said. An effort to establish the first-ever deadline on Tuesday to end deforestation by 2030 was set by 150 countries, however Brazil – a key player in the practice – refused to sign the agreement.
“World leaders promised in their non-binding remarks to spend a total of at least $5 billion to make the world more sustainable. That often includes turning away from the burning of coal, oil and gas and away from the destruction of the world’s carbon-absorbing forests,” the news organization said. “Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, stressed it could be done without harming the economy,” and vowed that over the next seven years, the EU would provide nearly $3.9 billion to “help developing countries become more sustainable.”