The “scientifically catastrophic” Paris climate change agreement was like someone agreeing to cut down from five burgers a day to four, according to leading environmental activist Naomi Klein.
In an exclusive interview with The Huffington Post UK in London this morning, the best-selling author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine set out her views on the deal.
While she praised the agreement secured this weekend as “politically historic”, Ms Klein accused David Cameron of throwing his early green credentials “under the bus” in the wake of the 2008 global banking collapse.
Speaking ahead of her appearance at University College London’s ‘Socialism, Capitalism and the Alternatives: Lessons from Russia and Eastern Europe’ event, Ms Klein gave her reaction to seeing “politicians wildly cheering for themselves in Paris” after the deal was agreed.
She said: “I couldn’t watch for long. It’s a very strange thing to cheer for setting a target that you are knowingly failing to meet.
“It’s like going: ‘I acknowledge that I will die of a heart attack if I don’t radically lower my blood pressure. I acknowledge that in order to do that I need to cut out alcohol, fatty foods and exercise everyday. I therefore will exercise once a week, eat four hamburgers instead of five and only binge drink twice a week and you have to call me a hero because I’ve never done this before and you have no idea how lazy I used to be.’”
Greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity will be reduced to “net zero” by the end of the century, while countries are required to step up their carbon reduction targets every five years.
Foreign Affairs Minister and President-designate of COP21 Laurent Fabius bangs the gavel to signal a deal has been struck
Ms Klein, whose most recent book “This Changes Everything” focuses on climate change, argued the political success of the deal does not match the scientific impact.
She said: “We live in this moment where different things are true simultaneously.
“It’s absolutely true that it’s a tremendous achievement to agree on the need to keep warming below 2 degrees, or 1.5 if that’s possible. It could have been worse, it absolutely could have been worse based on past experiences.
“It could have been much more acrimonious when you think you’re dealing with states that have revenues from fossil fuels making up as much as 95 per cent of their government revenues and states that are very far along in energy transition agreeing to the same document it’s an achievement.
“But the tension is something can be politically historic and scientifically catastrophic at the same time. Those truths can co-exist and do co-exist.”
All of this comes after Mr Cameron famously touted himself as friend of the environment when he became Tory leader in 2005, even hugging a husky on a visit to the Arctic in 2006.
Ms Klein said: “The way the government has pushed for fracking and off-shore oil drilling is completely inconsistent with the campaign David Cameron first ran on.”
When asked if she felt let down by him, she replied: “I never believed in Cameron so I don’t feel let down by him.
“He fits a very clear pattern in Europe that pre-2008 when the economy was doing better you had even right wing parties talking a good game about climate change and when the economic crisis hit the climate was just kind of thrown under the bus.
“That’s true in Britain and you see it with the push for more fossil fuel extraction, you see it with the attacks on renewables, you see it also with the cuts to the agency that deals with the impacts of climate change. Cutting flood defence programmes, which as we’ve just been reminded is absolute madness.”
David Cameron hugs a husky in 2006
It’s not just those who sought to rebuild the economic world using the mantra of austerity who Ms Klein feels is letting down climate change activists – anti-austerity parties are also failing the movement.
She said: “I don’t think this dynamic is going to change until the fights for economic justice and the fight for climate action become the same.
“If it is just about going on a march and if it just about parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere that’s not going to motivate a movement that is as motivated as Exxon and Shell to protect the status quo.
“When people are fighting for a future that is better than their present, not just better than a catastrophe far off in the future, better than right now which is intolerable, better than unemployment, better than crumbling services, better than relentless austerity – that’s the movement.
“That’s why I find it endlessly frustrating that Europe’s anti-austerity parties almost never talk about climate change.” SOURCE
Canada’s new trade minister has sitting on her desk the sweeping Trans-Pacific Partnership, a deal some say will accelerate the gap between rich and poor by protecting corporations’ interests over those of workers and governments.
The winners, say high profile critics, will be captains of global finance and others already so moneyed they’ve earned the moniker plutocrats.
That’s a class of people Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland knows extremely well. Plutocrats is the title she gave her 2012 book about how they are sucking up riches for themselves as income inequality grows. Freeland takes readers into the world of the super-rich, who play by different rules and lead opulent and vastly different lives than the rest of the human race.
The former reporter for the Financial Times goes at the wealthy and powerful hard, pointing out how their success is coinciding with the destruction of “everyone else.”
That puts Freeland in an interesting position, to say the least, as she mulls whether and how to manage passing the TPP, which was negotiated in secret by the recently ousted Conservative government, but endorsed by Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during the election.
TPP as inequality accelerator
Freeland must be aware of criticism, coming from a range of respected sources, that the TPP will widen the wealth gap in developing countries as well as the U.S. and Canada.
“If the Trans-Pacific Partnership is enacted,” Robert Reich, secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, has warned, “big corporations, Wall Street, and their top executives and shareholders will make out like bandits. Who will the bandits be stealing from? The rest of us.”
Foreign Policy magazine published a piece in July arguing the TPP is harmful to developing economies, including inhibiting their ability to use state-owned enterprises to boost some sectors of their economies.
And Robert E. Scott, director of trade and manufacturing at the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute, told The Tyee the TPP will increase the wealth gap in the West as more jobs are outsourced.
The profits from such moves only go to those who own stock in the companies sending their labour elsewhere, Scott said.
He said international trade deals pitting western workers against low-wage labour abroad has forced millions of Americans into unemployment or in jobs making smaller wages. The TPP will only increase the trend, he said.
“Even if trade were balanced we stand to lose the good jobs,” he said of the United States. “Manufacturing pays more than alternative jobs in the economy.”
The deal will increase the current $150 billion trade deficit the U.S. already has with TPP nations rather than shrink it, he argues. The impact will be harder if China and South Korea join in the future.
Friday the United Steelworkers Union adopted a resolution urging Canadian and American governments to reject the agreement.
“The TPP will only continue the failed trade policies of the past that have valued corporate profits, wherever obtained, over the interests of job and opportunity creation here at home. The USW will put every effort into defeating the TPP,” said the international union in a release.
In Plutocrats, Freeland seems to agree with that analysis.
“Both globalization and technology have led to the rapid obsolescence of many jobs in the West; they’ve put western workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in poorer countries; and they’ve generally had a punishing impact on those without the intellect, education, luck or chutzpah to profit from them.”
‘Crony capitalism’
In 2013 Freeland gave a Ted Talk in Scotland about the problem of the income gap growing not just in the West, but all over the world. (You can join 1.6 million others in watching it here.)
Near the beginning of her speech, Freeland points out Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have as much wealth combined as the bottom 40 per cent of the United States.
“We’re living in the age of surging income inequality, especially at the top,” she told the Ted crowd. “What’s driving it and what can we do about it?”
Freeland blames privatization, anti-union legislation and deregulation as some of the reasons wealth has been bleeding to the top and creating a new aristocracy.
“A lot of these political factors can be broadly lumped under the category of crony capitalism — political changes that benefit a group of well-connected insiders but don’t actually do much good for the rest of us,” she said. “In practice getting rid of crony capitalism is incredibly difficult.”
She pointed to how hard it has been to tweak banking regulations after the 2008 crisis, or getting companies to pay as much tax as members of the public. These issues unite both the left and right, she said.
Helping out that crony capitalism are globalization and technology, which can make people extremely rich quickly. But that’s not enough for the new super-rich, she said.
“Once you have the tremendous economic power that we’re seeing at the very, very top of the income distribution and the political power that inevitably entails it, it becomes tempting as well to start trying to change the rules of the game in your own favour,” she said.
“It’s what the Russian oligarchs did in creating the sale of the century privatization of Russia’s natural resources. It’s one way of describing what happened with deregulation of financial services in the U.S. and the U.K.”
That kind of power is leading to the hollowing out of the middle class in the West as the wealthy lean on governments for legislation that helps them become richer, she said, which has led to the offshoring of western jobs enabled by trade deals.
Hearing from the mega-rich
If Freeland still holds such concerns, none of them are on display in how the Liberal government is characterizing the TPP.
“The elimination and reduction of tariffs offer the prospect of new and enhanced market access opportunities for Canadian producers, manufacturers and processors,” said the Global Affairs Canada website Friday. “Preferential access to foreign markets through tariff liberalization will make Canadian goods more competitive in those markets.”
Scott cautions he’s seen politicians in the past change their tune once they are given the direction of their political overlords.
And no one could mistake Freeland’s Plutocrats for a radical call to arms against capitalism, which she had said is “the best prosperity-creating system humanity has come up with so far” if in need of “retooling.” In her book, she musters admiration for those cornering so much of the world’s wealth, finding them to be “hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition.” But the rich, she reminds, truly are different from the rest. They “have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who haven’t succeeded quite so spectacularly.”
That’s apparent in the views some plutocrats shared with Freeland. As a Guardian review of her book noted:
“‘I think the ultra-wealthy actually have an insufficient influence,’ says one billionaire Republican donor. Another says taxes should be virtually abolished, arguing that the government should pay the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs for their contributions to society. ‘It’s that top one per cent that probably contributes more to making the world a better place than the 99 per cent,’ he concludes outrageously.”
The Tyee sought comment from Freeland on whether she and her government intend to promote, change or scuttle the TPP. No response yet, but if she does grant an interview, we will ask her, in addition, to give her take on the treaty in the context of her book.
In the meantime, here is a quote from the conclusion of Plutocratsthat would seem relevant:
“Trying to slant the rules of the game in your favour isn’t an aberration, it is what all businesses seek to do. The difference isn’t between having virtuous and villainous business people, it is about whether your society has the right rules and policing able to enforce them.” SOURCE
Jeremy J. Nuttall is The Tyee’s Parliament Hill reporter in Ottawa. Find his previous stories here. This coverage of Canadian national issues is made possible because of generous financial support from our Tyee Builders.
Troubles in the Mediterranean and potential fixes in the Seychelles show why the world’s seas need more attention during the climate negotiations.
Algae have exploded on the floor of the Mediterranean off La Ciotat in southern France due to warmer waters. The organisms smother other sea life, altering the ecosystem. PHOTOGRAPH BY BORIS HORVAT
MARSEILLE, France —Out Thierry Perez’s office window, past the crumbling 16th century island prison where Alexandre Dumas set the “Count of Monte Cristo,” roils a Mediterranean Sea that didn’t exist just a few decades ago.
Major disease outbreaks worsened by warming waters now strike sea life five times more than when Perez, a marine ecologist with the French government, began studying the Mediterranean in the 1990s. Water temperatures have risen two to three times faster than across the world’s oceans at large. Half of the Mediterranean’s fish are pushing north, with wrasses and barracuda once native to North Africa now common off southern France.
Populations of bream fish, like these off Marseille in southern France, are expected to decline due to global warming. Warmer and less-oxygenated oceans make it difficult for bigger fish to get enough oxygen to grow. PHOTOGRAPH BY BORIS HORVAT
Yet just four hours away by train, international climate negotiators in Paris have been reluctant to even mention oceans in their formal blueprints outlining an action plan for combating global warming. With so much division over how to curb greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and the burning of coal oil and gas, few global leaders were willing to add something else for 195 battle-weary countries to squabble about.
Ocean scientists streamed into France anyway, coming from around the world to insist the seas get more attention in the United Nations climate strategy. The marine world is too important to overlook, they say, both as a victim of climate change but also as place that can be part of the fix.
“We need to put oceans on the agenda,” Vladimir Ryabinin, a Russian marine scientist and executive secretary of UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, told a panel of researchers in Paris. “Oceans are the common heritage of all mankind.”
What’s clear is we have a marine population [in the Mediterranean] that is just more and more sensitive. Thierry Perez, Marine ecologist
From the outside, this battle may seem academic: Negotiators aren’t suggesting the seascape that covers 70 percent of earth is unimportant. But many advocates say so much is happening so quickly in these watery environments that oceans need a higher profile that would elevate discussion of their problems and create momentum to solve them.
Already a new proposal to protect the Indian Ocean off the Republic of Seychelles is being highlighted as a model to protect against climate change. Conservationists are turning to complicated financial instruments to raise money for ocean protection in developing island nations.
Fishermen lift bluefin tunas onto their boat off Barbate in Spain. In this traditional technique, nets are used to catch tuna as they migrate from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. Because of warming waters, bluefin tuna now stick around longer in the sea’s western regions. PHOTOGRAPHY BY PABLO BLAZQUEZ DOMINGUEZ
But scientists say policymakers and the public first need to understand how fast changes are coming. For that, says Perez, there’s no place quite like the Mediterranean. “It’s like its own miniature ocean,” he says.
Sponges Die, Flatfish Increase
Stretching from Spain to the Balkans and from Libya to France, the Mediterranean occupies nearly a million square miles. It’s connected to the world’s oceans through the Strait of Gibraltar to the west and the Suez Canal to the southeast.
It’s proximity to the climate talks–and that unusual geography that keeps it mostly isolated from other oceans–makes it a microcosm of many problems affecting the seas. Neither a tropical nor polar environment where scientists expected to see problems appearing first, the Mediterranean is, even for Perez, sometimes hard to grasp because it’s experiencing so many changes.
We’re trying to shift the narrative on oceans -Andrew Deutz,The Nature Conservancy
It’s here that a colleague stumbled on one of the earliest signs that climate appeared to be altering marine waters. In the late 1980s a disease started killing off marine sponges, some of which had been harvested for 4,000 years. By the 1990s scientists began linking the virulence of the pathogen to the unusual warmth of the water. “It was a very impressive syndrome,” Perez says. That was just the beginning.
Before 1995, it was unusual to see 10 major marine-life epidemics in five years. Today, one five-year span might include 50 disease outbreaks, causing die-offs of everything from corals to bryozoans. Some pathogens even drove localized extinctions of some creatures, including a species of sea fan in Italy and a sponge in Monaco.
A long-snouted wrasse swims in seaweed off Costa Brava, Spain. PHOTOGRAPH BY REINHARD DIRSCHERT, ULLSTEIN BILD
Temperatures now let invasive species, such as algae-grazing rabbitfish, introduced through the Suez Canal from the Red Sea, explode. Some invertebrates are dwindling because the season for males to mate has changed even though females are still ready to reproduce at the same time they always have been.
And as species move, the entire system is reorganizing. Bluefin tuna now stick around longer in the sea’s western regions. In the northernmost stretches of southern France and the Adriatic, where the sea is bounded by land, some animals have no place left to go to find cold water. When that happens, Perez says with a shrug, “Sometimes they die.”
Herring-like sprat between Italy and the Balkans have all but disappeared, even though they were barely fished. Sardine populations, on the other hand, are bigger in the north than they’ve ever been.
Perez acknowledges that it can be hard to tease out the role of fishing and land pollution as partial culprits, but he says warming waters are compounding everything else, often in unpredictable ways.
The fishing industry recently started catching more sole and other flatfish up north. Eventually scientists determined that increased precipitation was filling rivers and giving them more power. As they spilled into the sea, they churned up the ocean bottom, causing more mixing and more production of food for the things flatfish eat.
It’s too soon to say where all this is leading, Perez says, but it’s clear more attention is needed. He’s met fisherman who have given up and switched jobs, and others who are finding new species to catch.
[The Mediterranean] is like its own miniature ocean. -Thierry Perez
“When we start talking about this to a wider audience, people are very concerned,” Perez says. “What’s clear is we have a marine population that is just more and more sensitive.”
Swapping Debt to Save Oceans
Trying to cushion ocean environments for this kind of havoc is what drove The Nature Conservancy to experiment in the Seychelles. Now other countries may replicate those efforts.
In the tiny archipelago of just over 100 islands, where half the land is already protected, rising seas, storms, pollution, and fishing were harming the coast and nearby reefs. Fishermen using hand-held lines to snag grouper and snapper began noticing that fish they caught for their families and sold to tourists were getting smaller. The commercial fishing industry, facing troubled reefs, started heading out to sea to catch more and bigger species. Some ran into pirates, which drove them back toward land, increasing the fishing pressure near shore.
“Coral reefs are our first physical protection from the ocean,” says Ronald Jumeau, Seychelles ambassador to the United Nations. And in Seychelles, now, “they’re under strain.”
With about 1,000 species of marine fish, 400 of them around their reefs, the government wanted a solution but it had no money to address the rising threats. In fact the government was deep in debt.
That’s when Rob Weary stepped in. The Nature Conservancy financial guru has been finding ways to use the creative wizardry of Wall Street–where debt is bought and sold like other commodities–to champion nature. He asked Jumeau if he could investigate a “debt-swap.”
That complicated financial transaction would allow The Nature Conservancy to work with the holders of the country’s debt to restructure payments on about $30 million. Through loans and grants, The Nature Conservancy would create a fund that the Seychelles government could use for conservation. A governing trust would manage the account.
Similar deals have been done on land, but not for marine conservation. Seychelles said yes, and the organizations spent several years negotiating.
Now the deal is final and plans are underway in the Indian Ocean. The country plans to protect up to 30 percent of the 1.4 million square kilometers of ocean within its exclusive economic zone.
The deal is expected to protect mangrove lagoons home to 11 seabird species and six types of sharks. It will likely set aside some vulnerable coral reefs so they can continue to help block storm surges. Scientists are studying the ocean waters trying to figure out which areas could be protected for use by fishermen and which should be off limits. Some of these areas might even change over time as fish stock rebuild or others warrant protection.
While none of these efforts will forestall climate change, it will help make the country more resilient to the effects.
Jumeau says his government is thrilled with the deal, and now other countries including Palau, the Marshall Islands, and Jamaica have expressed interest in trying something similar. The Nature Conservancy also is experimenting with taking out insurance policies on coral reefs, trying to get the tourism industry financially vested in making sure they stay healthy for the long run.
“We’re trying to shift the narrative on oceans,” says Andrew Deutz, with the Nature Conservancy. “They should be thought of as part of the solution. There are all kinds of things we can do if we really try.” SOURCE
John Kerry has rejected criticism from prominent climate scientist James Hansen that the Paris climate talks were a “fraud” and insisted the resulting deal will spur a global transition from fossil fuels towards renewable energy.
The Paris accord, the culmination of 20 years of often fraught climate talks, has been hailed as a success by various world leaders after 195 countries agreed to curb greenhouse gas emissions in a bid to hold global temperatures to 1.5C above preindustrial levels.
The 31-page agreement, thrashed out following two weeks of talks on the outskirts of Paris, also sets out the transfer of $100bn to poorer countries to help them adapt to the consequences of climate change.
But Hansen, a former Nasa scientist considered the father of wider public understanding of climate change, tempered optimism by telling the Guardian on the eve of the deal that the talks were a “fraud” and a “fake” because they would not result in a carbon tax that would drive down fossil fuel use.
Asked about Hansen’s comments by ABC, in an interview broadcast on Sunday, Kerry, who led US negotiators in Paris, said he disagreed.
“Look, I have great respect for Jim Hansen and I was there in 1988 when he first warned everybody climate change was happening,” the secretary of state said.
“But with all due respect to him, I understand the criticisms of the agreement because it doesn’t have a mandatory scheme and it doesn’t have a compliance enforcement mechanism. That’s true.
“But we have 186 countries, for the first time in history, all submitting independent plans that they have laid down, which are real, for reducing emissions.
“And what it does, in my judgment, more than anything else, there is a uniform standard of transparency. And therefore, we will know what everybody is doing.
“The result will be a very clear signal to the marketplace of the world that people are moving into low carbon, no carbon, alternative renewable energy. And I think it’s going to create millions of jobs, enormous new investment in R&D [research and development], and that R&D is going to produce the solutions, not government.”
Hansen and Kerry have previously clashed over the idea of a fee on each tonne of carbon dioxide emitted. Hansen told the Guardian he spent an hour trying to convince Kerry of the merits of the idea shortly after Barack Obama became president, only to be rebuffed.
Hansen said the subsequent cap-and-trade plan, which was later abandoned, was “absurd” as it did not properly price fossil fuels in relation to their damage to human health and the environment.
Hansen said he “foolishly” had high hopes that Obama would convince hostile Republicans and the public that a carbon fee was needed to tackle climate change.
“But he’s not particularly good at that,” Hansen said. “He didn’t make it a priority and now it’s too late for him.”
Republican opposition to any action on climate change, including the Paris agreement, could still hamper US efforts to reduce emissions and provide more than $3bn to nations considered at risk from rising sea levels and extreme weather.
The Republican-controlled Congress has passed bills to overturn Obama’s plan to use the Environmental Protection Agency to cut emissions from power plants. A future Republican president would be unlikely to veto such legislation.
Kerry said he didn’t think the American public would accept US backtracking on climate change in the wake of the Paris deal.
“I think, frankly, a lot of members of Congress are on the wrong side of history,” he told the ABC.
“And I don’t believe you can be elected president of the United States if you don’t understand climate change or you’re not committed to this kind of a plan.
“Obviously, if a Republican were elected, they have the ability, by executive order, to undo things … but that’s why I don’t believe the American people – who predominantly do believe in what is happening with climate change – I don’t think they’re going to accept as a genuine leader someone who doesn’t understand the science of climate change and isn’t willing to do something about it.” SOURCE
After two weeks of bleary all-nighters in Paris, diplomats from around the world have hammered out a major global agreement to address climate change. Here’s the full 31-page document, which was approved by 195 countries on Saturday.
It’s important to be clear on what this wad of paper actually does. The Paris climate agreement hasn’t saved the planet and it hasn’t solved global warming. Not by itself. Instead, the deal is supposed to add structure and momentum to efforts that are currently underway around the world to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
That’s a worthwhile task in its own right. Since 2014, nearly every country has submitted a voluntary plan to the United Nations for tackling climate change. The US is reducing carbon dioxide from power plants. China is boosting wind and solar. And so on. But those pledges, in the aggregate, remain weak and inadequate. If you add them all up, global emissions are projected to keep rising through 2030, putting us on pace for 2.7°C (or more) of warming by century’s end. That’s well above the 2°C threshold that many scientists argue is unacceptably risky:
(Javier Zarracina/Vox)
What this Paris agreement does, then, is provide a set of diplomatic tools to prod countries into cutting emissions even more deeply over time. The deal’s text starts with aspirational goals: the world should aim for an emissions peak “as soon as possible” and limit total warming to less than 2°C, or perhaps even to 1.5°C. (The Earth has already warmed about 1°C since pre-industrial times.) It’s a signal that countries at least hope to do more than they’re already doing.
The deal then adds transparency measures to verify that nations are actually restraining their emissions. Importantly, it requires that countries reconvene every five years to reconsider the ambition level of their pledges. And wealthy countries have set a goal of providing more than $100 billion per year in public and private financing by 2020 for poorer countries, to help them invest in clean energy and cope with sea-level rise, droughts, floods, and other ravages of climate change.
There are plenty of hard questions about how effective these diplomatic tools will be. Will the transparency measures work? Will that climate aid actually materialize? The basic reality, though, is that the Paris agreement can only encourage countries to step up their efforts. It can’t force them to do so. That’s the hard part, the part that comes next. Further action will ultimately depend on policymakers and investors and engineers and scientists and activists across the globe, not the UN.
In other words, the Paris deal is only a first step. Perhaps the easiest step. To stop global warming, every country will have to do much, much more in the years ahead to transition away from fossil fuels (which still provide 86 percent of the world’s energy), move to cleaner sources, and halt deforestation. They’ll have to pursue new policies, adopt new technologies, go far beyond what they’ve already promised.
If we want decent odds of staying below 2°C of global warming — the grandiose target laid out in the Paris deal — then most countries will have to make radical changes, and quickly. It’s an extraordinarily difficult undertaking, with no guarantees we’ll succeed.
What the Paris climate deal does, exactly
This crowd is riveted by Article 15. (Shutterstock)
Start with this fact: The Paris deal, negotiated through the United Nations, does not legally require any emission cuts. Negotiators tried to craft an agreement like that back in 1997, with the Kyoto Protocol, and it simply didn’t work. It was infeasible to force countries to make sharp cuts they didn’t want to make.
Instead, the Paris talks took a radically different approach. Every country started off by deciding for itself how it plans to tackle greenhouse gas emissions, taking into account its own unique domestic situation. Since 2014, every single major emitter has submitted a climate pledge to the UN. A few highlights:
The United States is vowing to cut its greenhouse gas emissions at least 26 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, through policies like the Clean Power Plan to decarbonize power plants.
The European Union will cut emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.
China has vowed that its emissions will peak around 2030 and that it will get about 20 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources by then.
Brazil will cut emissions 37 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, with an emphasis on curbing illegal deforestation in the Amazon.
India will continue to reduce its carbon intensity, or CO2 output per unit of economic activity, in line with historic levels (though overall emissions will grow).
These pledges are all plausible, rooted in each countries’ analysis of what’s politically possible and technologically feasible. But they’re also insufficient to avoid serious climate change. As noted earlier, if you assume every country follows its pledge to the letter, global emissions would nonetheless keep rising through 2030, and we’ll be setting ourselves up for around 3°C of global warming by century’s end, well past the 2°C mark long considered bad news.
So that’s where this Paris agreement comes in. The goal was to provide a support structure that will, negotiators hope, allow these national pledges to get stronger over time. Key features in the final deal include:
An overall temperature goal. The Earth has already warmed about 1°C since pre-industrial levels, thanks to all the greenhouse gases we’ve put into the air. As part of the Paris deal, countries are aiming to overall total global warming to less than 2°C, and possiblyeven keep it down to 1.5°C, in recognition that many dangerous impacts are likely to occur above that level. Of course, these goals are only aspirational, and they’ll be impossible to meet without policies to match.
An overall emissions goal. Currently global emissions aren’t expected to peak until 2030 or later, which would make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to stay below 2°C. So, as part of the deal, countries agreed on a vague goal of aiming for peak emissions “as soon as possible.” They will also aim to achieve net zero emissions by the second half of the century, though there’s no specific timeline.
Pledges will get reviewed every five years. As noted before, the current climate pledges offered by nations don’t come anywhere close to keeping us below 2°C of global warming, let alone 1.5°C. So, as part of the deal, countries will be encouraged to submit new and stronger pledges every five years, starting in 2020. Again, this agreement won’t require anyone to keep cutting more deeply, but the goal is to pressure countries to consider stronger action over time.
Financing for poor countries: Poorer countries will need help in adopting clean energy and adapting to climate impacts — floods, storms, sea-level rise, and so on. So the deal requires developed countries to provide aid for this purpose, although it doesn’t mandate a specific number. (Developed countries have set a non-binding goal of $100 billion per year in public and private investment by 2020, and the deal calls for an increase over time.) The accountability measures here are fairly weak. In the past, critics say, rich countries have often relabeled existing aid as “climate aid.” There’s no provision here to ensure that this financing is brand new.
Loss and damage. A certain amount of global warming is already baked into the system, and some countries are going to suffer no matter what. Low-lying islands, for instance, could get consumed by sea-level rise. So many poorer countries had been pushing for compensation from richer countries, which are after all responsible for most of the emissions in the atmosphere. The US had opposed this, and the deal “does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation.” But it does set up committees to deal with displacement and other related issues.
Transparency measures. The deal calls for yet-to-be-determined reporting and monitoring measures to ensure that countries are actually cutting their emissions as much as promised. Countries like China and India had opposed overly intrusive inspections, which is why the deal calls for a “transparency framework” that is “facilitative, non-intrusive, non-punitive manner, respectful of national sovereignty, and avoid placing undue burden on Parties.” How this works in practice remains to be seen.
Legal status. This deal has a fairly odd legal status. The climate pledges themselves are not binding — if a country fails to cut emissions as much as it had promised, there are no penalties or anything. But much of the supporting structure is binding: the transparency mechanisms, the promise to come back every five years, etc. The main reason for this set-up is so that the treaty does not have to be ratified by the US Senate, which would never happen. (Though it also means a future US president could pretty easily abandon Obama’s climate pledges.)
You’ll notice that some of these provisions are ambiguously worded and will likely need to be hashed out in future UN sessions, starting with the 2016 summit in Morocco. “Many segments contain very vague language, but this kind of ‘constructive ambiguity’ is often the only way to get a deal done,” explained Oliver Geden, who heads the EU research division at SWP, the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “The actual meaning will only develop over time, as a result of ongoing power struggles.”
The Paris deal will officially come into force when at least 55 countries accounting for 55 percent of global emissions have formally acceded. (So, for instance, you’d probably need China, the United States, Europe, India, and Russia to all come on board.)
Will this climate deal actually work? Can we stay below 2°C?
I never get invited to any of these fancy conferences. (Shutterstock)
There’s ample room for skepticism about this agreement. Countries are offering up entirely voluntary climate pledges that are, so far, awfully flimsy. (India, for instance, has said that its emissions will keep rising indefinitely as it burns more coal to climb out of poverty.) The parties have only agreed to vague feel-good goals at Paris — limit global warming to 1.5°C, have emissions peak “as soon as possible” — without a well-defined plan for how to actually achieve those targets.
So, yes, there’s a chance that the Paris deal, and the processes it sets in motion, could prove ineffective. That’s the risk with any treaty based on voluntary actions. It’s why you see critics like James Hansen, a prominent climate scientist, calling these talks “worthless.”
Again, though, the rationale behind the Paris approach was that no one could ever get China, India, or the United States to agree to a legally binding UN deal that mandated deep cuts or global carbon taxes from the get-go. So, instead, negotiators decided to start with voluntary pledges, ensure universal participation, and then try to iterate from there, through cooperation and political persuasion.
As political scientist David Victor told me: “The encouraging precedent here is in trade — where you get a bicycle theory of cooperation.” This is the idea that once the process of trade liberalization gets underway, it keeps gathering momentum in subsequent talks. “You build credibility and trust over time and then move to bigger issues.”
Or, if you like metaphors: Think of the countries making climate pledges as a bunch of out-of-shape slobs trying (and failing miserably) to qualify for a relay event. The Paris agreement can’t force these people to train harder. But it can put their names up on a whiteboard, track their progress, work out gym subsidies for those who can’t afford it, and facilitate peer pressure. Obviously theexercise is the crucial part, and that ultimately depends on each individual. But that other stuff can help.
So it’s worth keeping these talks in perspective. The Paris agreement can support ongoing efforts to reduce fossil-fuel emissions and curb deforestation. But whether Earth warms 2°C or 2.5°C or 3°C simply won’t be decided by this deal alone. That will depend on what future policies get enacted by individual countries, on how quickly we switch over to alternative energy sources, on how technology evolves.
And the bottom line is that current policies will have to undergo a serious revision if we want to avoid drastic temperature increases. A recent report from MIT and Climate Interactive looked at how national pledges would have to be ratcheted up between now and 2030 to stay below 2°C of warming:
(Sterman et al, 2015)
Those are wrenching changes. China would have to do much more to ramp up low-carbon energy and shift away from coal so that emissions peak by 2025 instead of 2030. The United States would have to double or triple its current climate policies. Coming even close to 2°C would involve far-reaching efforts to decarbonize homes, vehicles, power plants, and factories. Clean tech would have to proliferate far more rapidly. Plus we’d likely need to develop technology to suck massive amounts of CO2 out of the air by the latter half of the century. No one knows if that’s even feasible.
But that would be true with or without this agreement. Tackling climate change is a massive, herculean task, the work of generations. That was true before the Paris deal, and it’s just as true now.
What else should I read about the Paris deal?
— Some of the best, most detailed analysis of the Paris climate agreement is happening over at Carbon Brief. Check out their rundown of the final deal here.
— Robert McSweeney and Roz Pidcock looked at why negotiators adopted the even more stringent goal of 1.5°C in the final deal. Many of the risks of climate change, such as damage to coral reefs, are thought to happen even before we hit 2°C. The problem is that it’s extremely unlikely, at this point, that we can cut emissions enough to stay at 1.5°C.
— Michael Levi has a smart analysis of the final Paris climate deal, noting that many of the divisions and acrimony that plagued past climate talks could still resurface in the future. He also notes that public perception of the deal could matter a lot in determining its success.
— Coral Davenport of the New York Times argues that the Paris deal will be a success if it provides a signal to markets and investors that clean energy is the future. We’ll see if that happens, but that could end up being the deal’s most concrete impact.
— Finally, one thing the Paris deal didn’t address was international shipping and aviation, which account for 4 percent of global emissions. That will be left for future talks. Read Julian Spector’s piece for a look at why this is such a tricky issue.
Kevin Anderson is the Deputy Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. He is an adviser to the British Government (as of 2009) on climate change.
“The Paris Agreement is a fitting testament to how years of diligent and meticulous science has ultimately weathered relentless and well-funded attempts to undermine its legitimacy. Building on this science base and under the inspiring auspices of the French people, the global community has come together as never before to tackle what is arguably the first truly globalised and self-induced challenge to humanity.
However, whilst the 2°C and 1.5°C aspirations of the Paris Agreement are to be wholeheartedly welcomed, the thirty-one page edifice is premised on future technologies removing huge quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere many decades from today. If such highly speculative ‘negative emission technologies’ prove to be unsuccessful then the 1.5°C target is simply not achievable. Moreover, there is only a slim chance of maintaining the global temperature rise to below 2°C.
In the absence of negative emissions, staying below the 2°C commitment demands levels of reductions in emissions far beyond anything discussed during the Paris negotiations. If we are serious about climate change, the 10% of the global population responsible for 50% of total emissions need to make deep and immediate cuts in their use of energy – and hence their carbon emissions. In addition, the huge and growing emissions from aviation and shipping, currently exempt from the Paris negotiations, need to be included for there to be any meaningful control over climate change in line with 2°C.
The inclusion of a 40Gt figure for 2030 as being in accordance with the 2°C commitment, underscores the techno-utopian framing of the Paris Agreement. It is hard to underplay the fundamental reliance on the massive uptake of untried negative emission technologies to maintain the legitimacy of the Agreement. However and despite this reliance, there is no direct reference to such technologies throughout the thirty-one-page document.
If the global community is to maintain emissions with the 2°C carbon budget, there needs to be much greater recognition of the profound and immediate challenges we face. The scale of emission reductions will not be delivered through eloquent speeches, win-win rhetoric and green-growth spin. Zero carbon energy technologies are a prerequisite of a 2°C future – but they are far from sufficient. They will only deliver the necessary levels of mitigation if they are accompanied by fundamental changes to the political and economic framing of contemporary society. This is a mitigation challenge far beyond anything discussed in Paris – yet without it our well-intended aspirations will all too soon wither and die on the vine. We owe our children, our planet and ourselves more than that. So let Paris be the catalyst for a new paradigm – one in which we deliver a sustainable, equitable and prosperous future for all.” SOURCE
The agreement will still raise global temperatures 3 to 4 degrees Celsius.
By Naomi Klein, reposted from The Nation, Dec 12, 2015
The Climate Deal in Paris Is Nowhere Near Enough
The climate deal that has been negotiated at COP21 crossed multiple red lines: Scientific red lines, equity red lines, legal red lines, and more.
The emissions targets outlined in the deal still amount to increases of 3 to 4 degrees Centigrade—an increase incompatible with organized civil society.
So today, protesters came together in the center of Paris to say that the deal cannot be the end of our climate justice struggle.
In this video dispatch, Naomi Klein outlines what has to come next.
![[Tyee]](../ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4308841/global_CO2_emissions_graphic.jpg)
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4600279/shutterstock_345786749.jpg)
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4600887/shutterstock_93409528.jpg)
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4596495/Screen%20Shot%202015-11-29%20at%208.06.35%20PM.png)
