Paris is burning
Worries are mounting that the global effort to fight climate
change will not meet its goals.
By KALINA
OROSCHAKOFF 11/28/18, 9:30 PM CET Updated
11/29/18, 9:40 AM CET
Illustration by Brian Stauffer for POLITICO
They were supposed to always have Paris.
Three years after world leaders celebrated the signing of a
landmark agreement intended to head off catastrophic global warming, the effort
looks to be going down in flames.
Scientists say the cuts to greenhouse gas emissions agreed
to under the 2015 Paris climate agreement fall far short of what would be
needed to meet the treaty’s goals. Meanwhile, national governments are failing
to deliver on even those promises, and the United States — regarded as a
linchpin in any effort to fight climate change — has announced it intends to
withdraw from the agreement altogether.
“You’ve got a hostile environment,” said Rachel Kyte,
special representative of the United Nations secretary-general on making energy
accessible to the poor. “It’s not just the U.S. The U.S. is giving other people
the permission to be less than their best selves.”
With burning forests, record-breaking temperatures and
melting polar ice caps as backdrop, negotiators will spend the first two weeks
in December at global climate talks in Katowice, Poland, working to firm up how
the Paris Agreement will be implemented.
U.S. President Donald Trump has made it clear he has no
intention of honoring the commitments made by his predecessor, Barack Obama.
But with atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at
their highest levels in human history and continuing to rise — last year,
global carbon dioxide emissions increased again after a three-year hiatus —
worries are rising that the agreement will fail to meet its objectives.
After a burst of optimism following the 2015 meeting in
Paris, “reality is starting to come back again,” said Glen Peters, a research
director at Norway’s Center for International Climate Research (Cicero).
The big achievement in Paris was getting 197 governments to
agree to the goal of keeping global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius —
ideally to 1.5 degrees Celsius — by the end of the century. The world has
already warmed by around 1 degree since industrial countries first began
burning fossil fuels in large quantities during the Industrial Revolution.
Rather than attempting to set fixed targets — as had been
done under the agreement’s predecessor, the Kyoto Protocol — negotiators in
Paris agreed that greenhouse cuts would be voluntary and non-binding.
For now, scientists say, the commitments made by individual
countries are far from what would be needed to meet the agreement’s goals.
Some smaller countries on the front lines of climate change
— like the Marshall Islands, which risk disappearing altogether if sea levels
continue to rise — have made significant commitments. But without similar
efforts from major polluters like the U.S., the European Union and China, there
will be little impact.
Current pledges on the table, including those made by the
U.S., are predicted to lead to around 3.2 degrees of warming — a level
scientists say will cause catastrophic change to the Earth’s environment.
“National commitments to combat climate change come up
short,” the U.N.’s Environment Program said this week.
Heading for the exits
Making promises was the easy bit. Getting countries to
follow through with painful steps like shutting down coal-fired power plants,
revamping their car industries and funneling billions from rich to poor
countries in climate finance is proving a lot tougher.
Challenging vested interests and removing subsidies from
sectors that have long benefited is hard, said Andrea Meza-Murillo, the deputy
chief negotiator for Costa Rica at the climate talks. “That, of course, will
generate a lot of social confrontation and it’s not easy to deal with that.”
U.S. President Donald Trump has made it clear he has no
intention of honoring the commitments made by his predecessor, Barack Obama.
Behind the scenes, U.S. climate diplomats will continue to
negotiate in closed-door negotiating rooms. But that doesn’t mean that the
Trump administration won’t, separately, set up side events promoting fossil
fuels — something it did at last year’s climate gathering in Bonn, to the alarm
of many of its participants.
China is pushing hard to boost its fleet of electric cars
and expand renewable energy, but its use of coal is back up this year after a
few years of decline. India and other emerging economies are continuing to
build new coal-fired power plants. “India can sell the narrative of
mind-boggling solar growth, which is partly true, but at the same time business
as usual is coal,” said Cicero’s Peters.
Meanwhile, with the U.S. out, other countries are taking
Trump’s lead and heading for the exits, according to Elisabeth Köstinger, the
environment minister of Austria, which currently holds the presidency of the
Council of the EU.
“It’s a very difficult balance for governments to be
ambitious but not overly ambitious” — Glen Peters, a research director at
Norway’s Center for International Climate Research
“Australia also raised doubts over the Paris Agreement,” she
said. “Other countries are following suit.”
Brazil — with a president-elect who is a climate skeptic —
on Wednesday announced it would withdraw its offer to host next year’s climate
talks, citing budgetary constraints.
European struggles
Even in the European Union, which has sought to position
itself as a leader in the fight, countries are falling short of their
commitments.
In Europe, Poland has a grand tradition of hosting climate
summits (Katowice is its third) while also supporting the coal industry, and
this year is no exception. Just days before the start of COP24, the country’s
energy ministry put out a long-term strategy showing that coal will be a
crucial part of the energy mix past 2040.
Countries such as the Netherlands are pushing to increase
the bloc’s 2030 emissions reduction goals, and Finland and Sweden have
announced they plan to be carbon neutral by 2045. But in the bloc’s bigger
countries, progress has been slower.
Despite Germany’s Energiewende green energy transformation,
politicians there have shied away from conflict with the powerful car industry
and put off shutting down the coal plants that generate nearly 40 percent of
the country’s electricity. Germany will miss its 2020 goal of cutting emissions
by 40 percent and is struggling to meet binding EU renewable and energy
efficiency goals, too.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron has been trying to
placate protesters demonstrating against a planned fuel tax hike. The so-called
Yellow Jackets movement has blockaded roundabouts, truck depots, bridges, and
even Paris’ iconic Champs-Elysées boulevard, demanding he retreat.
“It’s a very difficult balance for governments to be
ambitious but not overly ambitious” because otherwise they tend to lose
elections, said Peters. “It’s very hard to change that about pissing a lot of
people off.”
‘Choking on the rule book’
The gathering in Katowice is supposed to be a largely
technical affair, working out how countries monitor and report their emissions
cuts and increase their climate and financial efforts over time. But that
doesn’t mean it will be easy.
“This will be a complicated COP, it will be difficult,”
European Energy and Climate Action Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete said last
month, expressing confidence the bloc “will be united, active, and leading.”
“The most important thing is that … we agree the rule book,”
he said. “If we don’t have a system to monitor, to review, to compare where are
we globally, Paris won’t be operational.”
“Without rapid cuts in CO2 and other greenhouse gases … the
window of opportunity for action is almost closed” — Petteri Taalas,
secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization
The gathering is also meant to serve as the first moment in
which governments signal that they will go beyond what they originally pledged
in Paris three years ago. But preparatory talks in the fall yielded little
reason for optimism.
The challenging political landscape, paired with the
difficulty of negotiating highly complex rules to implement the deal, is
dragging the process down.
“I think people are choking on the rule book,” said the
U.N.’s Kyte. “This was always going to be the hard work.”
Aiming for zero emissions
Climate scientists say the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping
warming below 1.5 degrees is still technically within reach — but getting there
would require unprecedented and radical changes in the world’s economies as
well as, pretty much an instant end to fossil fuel use.
Hitting the deal’s more ambitious goal would require
reaching net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by around 2050, according to the
U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “There are no
obstacles to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees besides the political
will,” according to Daniela Jacob, a climate scientist and one of the lead
co-authors of the IPCC report.
For now, that seems to be obstacle enough. Atmospheric
levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases “reached another new record high,”
according to the World Meteorological Organization, a U.N. body. It warned
there’s “no sign of a reversal” in the trend.
“Without rapid cuts in CO2 and other greenhouse gases … the
window of opportunity for action is almost closed,” said Petteri Taalas, the
organization’s secretary-general.
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