Will the Paris Climate Deal Save the World?
It will probably be 10 years before anyone can say whether the Paris climate deal, which was agreed to with much hoopla on December 12th, was a historic event that marked the moment when the human race finally got serious about the fight against climate change, or just a United Nations therapy session whose main role was to make us feel better about our headlong plunge toward climate catastrophe.
My bet is that it’s a mix of both. The importance of the agreement is hard to overstate. For the first time in history, virtually every nation in the world made voluntary commitments to cut carbon pollution and help vulnerable countries deal with the impacts of climate change. There are plenty of devils in the details, but the larger message was unambiguous: After decades of arguing, fighting and betrayal, the people of the world stood together and said goodbye to fossil fuels. The conference was so full of good feeling that it almost felt like a Coke commercial. Secretary of State John Kerry, who worked as hard on this deal as anyone, believes it will unleash a wave of clean-energy innovation: “If 150 nations are taking it seriously and setting targets, even if they don’t make them, that will generate massive investment and a huge amount of private-sector activity,” he told me before the conference began. “And then you have to hope that somebody comes up with clean-energy technology, which makes it competitive with fossil fuel, and then, boom, you get your low-carbon economy.”
But there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. For one thing, important aspects of the agreement – including carbon-pollution reductions and promises from rich nations to help poor nations pay for clean-energy technology and climate adaptation measures – are not legally binding. For another, the $100 billion a year that rich nations have committed to help poorer nations is still not enough. Finally, the emissions reductions in the agreement don’t add up to much. The explicit goal of the agreement is to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.7 F), which is the widely agreed-upon threshold for dangerous climate change. But as it stands today, even if all 195 nations make good on their existing commitments (a pipe dream), the planet will still warm by nearly 3 C by the end of the century, which could be enough to drown Miami and turn the American Southwest into the Sahel. The agreement does include an aspirational goal of holding warming to 1.5 C, which would basically require every nation of the world to quit burning fossil fuels by the middle of the century, if not sooner. As one observer in Paris quipped to me, “They may as well agree that all fairies shall ride unicorns too.”
Will the Paris Climate Deal Save the World?, Page 1 of 9