Spain declares a national climate emergency

Officials in Spain on Tuesday approved a declaration of a national climate emergency, stating that they will send legislation to parliament within 100 days to address the issue.

The Associated Press reported that Cabinet officials have set targets that coincide with the European Union’s (EU) goals of reducing net carbon emissions to zero by 2050. The government also wants 95 percent of its energy to come from renewable sources by 2040.

Details of the government’s plan have yet to be released, but the AP reports that officials are hoping to convert the region’s farming industry to produce zero carbon emissions and eliminate emissions from buses and trucks in the country.

Spain is one of more than two dozen countries that have declared similar states of emergency over climate change in recent years, with many doing so when the EU’s European Parliament declared such an emergency in November.

A United Nations report in November found that drastic action is needed by world governments to cut carbon emissions in order to avert the worst effects of climate change, including severe weather patterns and rising sea levels.

That report found that global carbon emissions are currently twice as high as the levels needed to avert such effects as was spelled out in the 2015 Paris climate accord, from which the Trump administration withdrew the same month the report was released.

Despite his actions and past rhetoric about the issue, President Trump asserted earlier this month that he does not believe the scientific theory of man-made climate change to be a hoax.

“Nothing’s a hoax about that. It’s a very serious subject. I want clean air; I want clean water. I want the cleanest air with the cleanest water. The environment’s very important to me,” Trump said at a White House event.

In the past, Trump has expressed skepticism about climate change, including a 2012 tweet suggesting it was a theory created by China to hurt U.S. manufacturing.

“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” he wrote at the time.