The world is shifting. At least that's what Bill McKibben, a leading environmental activist, tweeted on November 6. He was referring to the recent wave of push-back against fossil fuel companies. On November 5 New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman opened an investigation against ExxonMobil for potentially lying to the public and investors about the risks of climate change. The next day, the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have transported 830,000 barrels of crude oil per day from the Canadian tar sands to refineries near Houston, was rejected by Pres. Barack Obama and effectively killed. Then only two days later, Peabody Energy announced that a two-year investigation by Schneiderman had come to a close, forcing the company to disclose any financial risks it faces from future government policies and regulations related to climate change.
It is tempting to take the rush of recent events optimistically, especially if you have been waiting to see more concerted action against human causes of climate change. In addition to McKibben, several activists, scientists and environmental lawyers agree the world is shifting from one doused in denial to one that might take big steps in the right direction. Such news, however, begs the question: What's behind this change of heart? "The science is strong and getting stronger," says Richard Alley, a geoscientist at The Pennsylvania State University. "And despite great efforts by clever people over decades, no one has succeeded in finding any real problems with the science or in generating any serious competing ideas." But what's more likely to change public opinion, many climate scientists point out, is the extreme weather prevalent today. Whether it is California's record-breaking drought or the fact that 2015, like the year before it, will set yet another first for the hottest year on record, people are now seeing the impacts that likely arise from climate change in their own backyards. It is no longer a threat relegated to the future and faraway places.
Not only is the public beginning to accept climate change as a real danger, they're realizing that fighting it is a viable option. Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann points to "the remarkable growth of renewable energy" as adding to the sense that public perception is at a tipping point. Cleaner energy sources are surging so much that 2014 marked the first time in 40 years that global carbon dioxide emissions stalled, and even droppedduring a time of economic growth. With the tie between economic growth and lower carbon emissions severed, the public has begun to see renewable energy as a viable alternative. Indeed, a recent Pew Research Center survey showed a clear global consensus on a need to tackle climate change. Across all 40 nations polled, roughly 78 percent of residents supported the idea that their countries should limit greenhouse gas emissions.
The perceived turning point from climate denialism to action does not appear to be a scientist's pipe dream, either. Lawyers who work at the forefront of climate policy agree that strong science and the ability to tackle climate change are changing people's minds. But several legal turns have also taken place. "I actually think there is a trend in public conversations and even in private conversations toward thinking about liability for major energy companies for climate harm in a way we haven't seen in many years," says Cara Horowitz, co-executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law. And proving companies libel might just be the next step toward a renewable future.
Horowitz says a legal angle into challenging big, man-made sources of carbon emissions began in court cases in the mid-2000s, particularly three lawsuits that were brought against fossil fuel companies under the federal common law of nuisance. Villagers in the Alaska coastal town Kivalina filed suit against several oil and gas companies in an attempt to be compensated for their relocation costs after flooding caused by the changing Arctic climate destroyed their homes. Residents along the Gulf of Mexico coast sued dozens of the nation's largest carbon polluters when they suffered losses from Hurricane Katrina. And several states brought a lawsuit against some of the nation's largest electricity generators to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.
All three cases failed after they reached the U.S. Supreme Court but they laid the groundwork for the legal thinking that Horowitz says is resurging now. Several changes have taken place in the years since. A crucial event occurred in 2013 when researcher and author Richard Heede at the Climate Accountability Institute calculated that only 90 companies, including Chevron, ExxonMobil and BP, were largely responsible for the climate crisis. "So relatively few companies really are proportionally responsible for a pretty large share of the climate change problem in a way that allows lawyers and others to start thinking about causality in a legal sense," Horowitz says.
Fuel was added to the fire earlier this year when an InsideClimate News investigation revealed that Exxon was aware of climate change as early as 1977 (before the oil giant merged with Mobil). The news group claimed that despite the information, the company spent decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change, arguing the science was still highly uncertain. It even promoted climate misinformation—in 1989 the company helped create the Global Climate Coalition to question the scientific basis of climate change concerns and dissuade the U.S. from signing the Kyoto Protocol to control greenhouse gas emissions. Had Exxon been immediately transparent about its own research, the world might have begun developing clean energy decades earlier. As such, many experts have likened these actions to the deceit spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking.
The key word, "deceit," has opened up a new legal pathway to investigate these companies—New York State's 1921 Martin Act. Because of the state's rich history of publicly traded financial markets, the law confers on its attorney general broad powers to investigate financial fraud. "There's no law quite like the Martin Act," says Patrick Parenteau, former director of Vermont Law School's Environmental Law Center and the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Clinic, "[It's] the strongest law in the country."
Although the law is nearly a century old, it has never been used in the fight against climate change. Using it against ExxonMobil will not be based on claims of injuries wrought by global warming (like the cases in the mid-2000s) but rather on failure to disclose information that investors need to know. If more companies have to accurately disclose any risks to their bottom line, like Peabody Energy now has to do, they might no longer stand on firm financial ground. They may lose investors and customers, helping shift investment from fossil fuel companies and toward those promoting clean energy. "It's kind of a back door to influencing the behavior of some of the largest oil and gas companies for the sake of climate change," Horowitz says.
And it is likely that the investigation will spur legal inquiries into other oil companies. ExxonMobil is not the only oil and gas company whose public stance on climate change did not match what we—and almost certainly they—knew about the risks of global warming at the time, Horowitz says. She and Parenteau agree that other companies likely listened to Exxon's experts and did some of their own research as well. If other investigations can prove that these companies also deceived the public, they too could lose investors. "It wouldn't surprise me," Horowitz says, "if this is the beginning of a storm."
Mountain guide and farmer Saul Luciano Lliuya is taking a German energy giant to court over the melting of the Churup Glassier which is threatening his home. Picture: AFP/Cris Bouroncle
OVER the next few weeks a case will play out that will have executives all over the world very nervous.
Peruvian farmer Saul Luciano Lliuya is suing German energy giant RWE, the self-described "biggest single emitter of CO2" in Europe, for $29,000 over what he claims the company is doing to his hometown.
Lliuya lives near the Andean city of Huaraz, under constant danger from a lake that threatens to flood the town and his house and farm along with it. He has watched the lake grow more than 30 times in volume in the last 40 years as the glacier that feeds it melts, and now wants enough money to engineer a solution.
So far, a letter of complaint to the company has gone unanswered and lawyers claim there is no legal basis for his case. But the farmer, backed by NGO Germanwatch is undeterred, and if successful, the unprecedented case could be the tip of the iceberg.
"It's sometimes said you can't do this stuff legally and the reality is that the barriers are political, not legal," said West Coast Environmental Law Staff Counsel, Andrew Gage.
The Canadian lawyer released a report this week outlining the legal basis for which individuals and groups who have suffered the effects of climate change could sue the companies deemed to have caused them. While it's very much an "emerging conversation", he said it's not as much of a legal leap as one might think.
"The way I look at it is you can't have a business model where you know you are causing billions of dollars of harm each year and not have a conversation about 'well hang on what's your responsibility there?' Sooner or later that conversation comes back to you," he said. Taking Climate Justice Into Our Own Hands, is written in conjunction with the University of the South Pacific's environmental law lecturer Margaretha Wewerinke and claims that a Climate Compensation Act adopted around the world could open the door for people to sue companies like ExxonMobil, BP and BHP Billiton based on the concept of climate change being a 'nuisance'.
It cuts to the heart of a key issue in the climate debate: How to ensure those who suffer the worst effects are compensated for a problem they didn't create?
"There clearly would be a risk that companies in Australia and in many countries around the world need to take into account," Mr Gage said.
"The amount of damages we're talking about being caused by climate change is huge. Some estimates put it currently at about $700 billion a year worldwide and rising and certainly there are particularly storm events or incidents that can cost billions of dollars in one fell swoop."
However the idea is difficult and slippery to define, with plenty of questions over who is responsible for how much global warming, and how climate-change induced weather events differ from weather events that would have happened anyway.
Despite the difficulty, the idea is gaining momentum in the legal space. Earlier this month the Human Rights Commission of the Philippines announced it would investigate whether fossil fuel companies could be held responsible for climate change following a petition brought to them by Greenpeace over the role of the "carbon majors" in global warming. Australian company BHP Billiton ranks number 19 in a list of major emitters topped by Chevron, ExxonMobil and Saudi Aramco, according to the report.
Greenpeace international executive director Kumi Naidoo said he hoped the decision would inspire other human rights commissions to take part, saying: "If I were a CEO of a fossil fuel company, I would be running scared."
BHP Billiton would not provide comment on the issue. However the company said it strongly supports efforts to reach the two degree global goal including putting a price on carbon. Their recent portfolio analysis into climate change said the company is working with governments and other groups to reduce emissions and provide energy for a developing world.
For Mr Gage, questions around implementation are no hurdle for a nation that he says cannot be left alone.
"If you've got a company that is knowing that its product is directly contributing on a very significant scale to causing billions of dollars of harm and death and displacing people from their lands and they're making billions of dollars in profit doing that, I think there is a very live question about whether they can just say 'well we don't bear any responsibility."
Despite the dysfunctional international process and the imperfect national promises and the arguments over detail, the Paris agreement – setting solid expectations for the world to limit temperature rise – gives even a cynic cause for optimism
Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, French foreign affairs minister Laurent Fabius and French President François Hollande react during the final plenary session at the Paris climate conference. Photograph: Stephane Mahe/Reuters
No superlative was left unused as the French president François Hollande, the foreign minister Laurent Fabius and the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon lined up on Saturday to maximise pressure on negotiators in Paris to accept the final draft of the climate agreement.
They would be "making history", it was a "moment of truth", it would go down as "a major date in the history of mankind", there would never be another chance, the future of the world, quite literally, depended upon the decision they were about to make that moment. And then they broke for lunch. The meeting was in France, after all.
Well-fed, and aware that the deal was already being hailed around the world, despite not yet being actually done, the negotiators did reconvene later in the day.
But then – even as everyone had started celebrating – the agreement almost fell apart.
Somehow, the word "should" had been replaced with "shall" in a crucial part of the text, which created the possibility of a legal obligation and a very big problem for the Americans, who may then have had to take the agreement to Congress, where it would be defeated.
The French proposed that the text simply be corrected, but some other delegates saw an opportunity – first African countries sought some compensatory last-minute changes but were persuaded by a number of countries, including China to desist. Then Nicaraguan negotiator Paul Oquist tried to get some concessions as well, and persisted. An hour ticked by.
Eventually – as things became desperate and ministers had been waiting in the room for 90 minutes not knowing the reason for the delay – both Cuban president Raul Castro and US secretary of state John Kerry were enlisted to call Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega to ask him to get his climate negotiator to stand down, according to a senior source. And then finally it was done, with whooping and jubilation and hugs all round.
It was the final step in a delicate diplomatic dance the French had played for a week to ease the negotiating blocs towards agreement and break down divisions that had atrophied over years – a second draft that built political capital in the developing world by leaning options their way, a third that tweaked some clauses back towards what the rich nations wanted and then – after several all-night negotiations – the moment, when the text was presented and adopted.
But was it really so historic? What did it really achieve? Two weeks at the climate summit were a wild ride between cynicism and the final realisation that there were reasons to be optimistic, despite the dysfunctionality of it all. And not just because of good lunches.
It is stuffy in the small packed room at the Paris climate summit where former Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is delivering a speech about the green economy. He's now the chair of the Global Green Growth Institute. He mentions planting four billion trees in the past four years. He doesn't mention his country still has one of the highest rates of rainforest deforestation in the world or the recent peatland fires that produced greenhouse emissions equivalent to the entire United States.
Foreign minister Julie Bishop praises the historic deal signed by nearly 200 countries at the end of the Paris climate talks
Australia's foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, is speaking now. She talks about the profound economic changes as the world moves away from fossil fuels, then slips in the apparently obligatory Australian-politics rider about fossil fuels also being around for a long time and helping alleviate poverty. She also mentions – yet again – that Australia will "meet and beat" its climate targets. She does not mention that Australia's total emissions are rising.
As she draws to a close, music starts up nearby. The "Paris" summit is actually 11km from the centre of Paris, an 18 hectare temporary tent city built around a former airport. The room is in a hangar, its thin plywood walls doing little to filter the strains of Songs of Freedom. The minister raises her voice to compete with Bob Marley.
It's moments like these that the blah blah of these climate summits becomes almost overwhelming. Endless scripted statements about doing the right thing by our children and saving the planet and the need for "ambitious action" blend into a wall of meaningless noise.
Delegates trudge past youth protesters doing street theatre or interpretive dance with barely a glance. A giant polar bear roars periodically. Sean Paul sings a toe-curlingly bad song called Love Song to the Earth. Ban Ki-moon walks past. Every morning cheerful people give everyone entering apples and chocolate. Days slide by.
At the same time, in the backrooms and the conference halls the actual negotiators reprise the same arguments they've been having for the past 23 years that are all about maximising their domestic political interests and doing little.
The disconnect seems cavernous.
Island states and low-lying "climate vulnerable" countries like the Marshall Islands, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Vietnam run an unexpectedly effective campaign to change the goal of the agreement from limiting global warming at 2C to bringing it back to less than 1.5C. They assemble powerful supporters, including the United States, the European Union, Germany, France, Brazil and – eventually – Australia. President Obama spent some of his two days in Paris meeting with island state leaders and calls himself an "island boy". The young activists paint 1.5C on their faces and sing songs about it in the streets.
In the end it all boils down to an agreed "purpose" in the Paris deal to hold global temperature increases to "well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit (them) to 1.5C, recognising that this would significantly reduce risks and impacts of climate change".
The need for a new goal is obvious, especially from the low-lying states' point of view. Two degrees, according to Michiel Schaeffer of Climate Analytics, would deliver destructive sea level rises, threaten the existence of many islands and cause enormous dislocation in the low-lying states. (It would also devastate the Great Barrier Reef.)
But the greenhouse gas reduction promises made by 187 countries in Paris – even if they are kept (and that's a very big if) would result in warming of between 2.7 and 3.5C. Almost 1C of warming is already locked in. To get to 1.5C most scientists think the world would have to suck back greenhouse emissions already in the atmosphere, using processes that remain uncertain.
And while negotiators and campaigners plead for a goal that appears unattainable, it is not until very late in the process – the second all-night meeting (called an "indaba", using a zulu word apparently because a previous meeting was held in Durban) – that the fight gets down to the rules under which countries account for, report and review what they actually will do to achieve the emission reductions they have promised.
This seems surprising, since these rules are the only real teeth this agreement has, because the targets themselves have to sit outside the legally binding part of the document (so the deal doesn't have to go to the US Congress where it would inevitably be scuppered) and the implementing rules contain no sanctions. The whole idea of this thing is that peer pressure holds countries to account and builds the trust that means they agree to deeper cuts over time.
It's doubly surprising since some of the individual country promises are what campaigners politely described as "patchy". Saudi Arabia, for example, has promised to reduce emissions by a specific amount each year, so long as the Paris agreement doesn't hurt its capacity to export oil. If it does – and that is surely part of the point of the exercise – the Saudis say they will have to contribute less. (They spend most of the week trying to block pretty much everything anyway). Other promises are conditional on countries getting money.
Many developing countries are determined to cling to a principle called "differentiation" enshrined in the 1992 climate convention agreed in Rio de Janeiro. It was conceived to recognise the fact that the industrialisation of rich countries was then responsible for most of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and it wasn't reasonable to suggest poor countries forgo industrialisation to deal with the problem. But China is now the world's largest greenhouse emitter. India is the fourth largest.
A new agreement can promise financial help to poor countries to cope with locked-in climate change, it can put different expectations of the extent of emission reductions different countries can deliver, and it can recognise that many of them just aren't able to do comprehensive emission calculations. But in the view of countries like the United States and Australia, it must set the expectation that China and India and big developing emitters will properly account for their greenhouse gases. This is what they call a "red line", a dealbreaker.
The issue is discussed for hours. International negotiators appear to require superhuman levels of patience, as well as the ability to withstand a process designed to wear them down through the sustained deprivation of sleep. In the end they find an acceptable compromise.
The agreement also established a system to review each country's emissions every five years and conduct regular global "stocktakes" of the targets and also the finance being provided. Those, like Australia and India, which have promised reductions by 2030, will be "requested" to do a 2020 review.
India has made it very clear it is likely to decline the request. It's formal pledge says things like "our ancient text says; "Keep pure! For the Earth is our mother! And we are her children!" and that "the ancient Indian practice of yoga, for example, is a system that is aimed at balancing contentment and worldly desires, that helps pursue a path of moderation and a sustainable lifestyle".
It includes actual plans, according to an assessment by Carbon Tracker, to lock in another generation of coal-fired power stations and emissions growing to five thousand million tonnes of CO2 by 2030, even though India also has plans for its renewable sector which is set to grow almost twice as fast as its coal-fired electricity generation. According to the United Nations Environment Program, the "gap" between fully implementing all the Paris promises and actually keeping global warming even to 2C is between 12 and 14 thousand million tonnes of carbon dioxide.
Comparing that reality with the political "support" for limiting warming to 1.5C makes the whole singing, dancing, roaring, sleepless circus seem pointless.
But then a series of coffee shop conversations challenge my cynic's take on the conference.
I'm talking to Howard Bamsey, who I've encountered at many of these events – he was Australia's lead negotiator in Kyoto in 1997 when the protocol was agreed as well as the special envoy on climate change in Copenhagen in 2009. He says he's been to 18 or 19 of these "conferences of the parties" or COPs – he's lost count. He's an academic now and has always been a details man, not someone to get carried away by the speeches and the singing.
And despite everything, he's optimistic.
"I've had this impression growing on me all week. When this process started governments were all important, whether they moved or not was the whole story. Here governments are only part of the picture. When we went to side events by business or environment groups 15 or 20 years ago it was all about the good ideas they might be able to do if they had the right policies. Now it's about what they have already done," he says.
I think back to the start of the conference. There was this thing called the Lima Paris Action Agenda where hundreds of businesses and thousands of regions and cities made promises to cut emissions that streamed into my email inbox in a torrent.
Mondelēz International promised US$400mn to support the production of sustainable cocoa with zero net deforestation in Africa; Germany, Norway and the United Kingdom announced they'd provide $5bn by 2020 if forest countries demonstrated measured, reported and verified emission reductions; 20 investor groups, representing US$3.2tr, committing to 'decarbonisation' of US$600bn in assets, 114 big companies promised to reduce emissions including Ikea, Coca-Cola, Dell, General Mills, Kellogg's, NRG Energy, Procter & Gamble, Sony and Walmart.
Clive Hamilton is the former head of the Australia Institute. He was also in Kyoto, in fact he was the one who did the quick calculations there to show Australia had pulled a swifty with the so-called "Australia Clause" which meant it knew it had already met its Kyoto target even before it was made because it could count land clearing that had already stopped in the state of Queensland.
He wrote on the Conversation website that for him "the most surprising revelation here at the Paris climate conference has been the astonishing shift in the world of investors over the past 12 months. There is now unprecedented momentum towards participating in the transition to a low-carbon economy, and the view at the "big end" of the conference is that a strong agreement will provide an extra shove. It's unstoppable now.
"It's not that investors and chief executives have had an ethical epiphany about climate change; it's just that they can see where the world is headed, and it makes sense to be part of it rather than being stuck in the economy of the 20th century."
Even the reporting issue – the need to shine a light on what governments are doing – might be to an extent taken out of the hands of governments and the detailed requirements of this agreement, because private groups like Climate Tracker and the World Resources Institute are doing their own calculations and increasingly governments have nowhere to hide.
John Niles teaches greenhouse gas accounting at the not-for-profit Greenhouse Gas Management Institute. In Paris he launched an international partnership with similar trainers around the world called the Carbon Institute. They'll educate a generation of greenhouse gas accountants who can do the work in every country the Paris agreement demands. And if countries can't or don't report properly, or try to hide what they are really doing, Niles says the same accounting skills can reveal the truth anyway.
"Of course we can check on governments," he says. "Satellites can check CO2 in the atmosphere ... they can measure the size of a forest and take multidimensional pictures ... they can create a pretty good picture of what a country is doing," he says.
When you look at Paris as an expression of global will, a final piece of evidence for business about where the world is heading, a turbo-charge for investment decisions that are already starting, then the whole kerfuffle about the 1.5C target also makes sense.
"It sends a signal, it creates a clear sense of direction, or urgency," says one veteran negotiator, who asks not to be named. "Without it the take-out message might have been about the ins and outs of exactly what each country was doing and when they would do it. This points to where the world needs to be going and where it intends to go and that signal is unambiguous."
Bamsey concedes the national promises are "very, very patchy." But he also says concentrating just on the detail of the reporting and the reviews misses the point.
"Some developed countries still think of reporting as a way of checking up because you don't want people getting away with anything, but that is really a reflection of the old thinking of climate change as a burden. Most governments understand it is in their national interest to do more ... what used to be seen as free riding, getting away with not acting, now is seen as economic suicide.
"I'm finding it impossible not to be optimistic because it feels like we have reached a tipping point, like this shift has become unstoppable," he says looking back on a lifetime of COPs like a parent assessing a wayward child who's somehow turned out OK despite everything.
And when the agreement is final reached, that is exactly what business is saying.
Nigel Topping, from a coalition called We Mean Business, calls it an "historic economic catalyst".
Michael Jacobs, senior adviser for the New Climate Economy project, says the long-term goals in the agreement send investors the clearest sign "that the world was on an irreversible and irrevocable downward trend in emissions".
So I leave thinking the Paris agreement – for the first time setting expectations for all nations and for the world – might just be a strong enough signal to give real momentum towards slowing global warming despite the dysfunctional international process and the imperfect national promises and the arguments over detail that will continue interminably at such conferences.
That's a cynical optimist's view of this extraordinary Paris summit.
There can be no complacency after the Paris talks. Hitting even the 1.5C target will need drastic, rapid action
'Think of the climate movement as personal trainers – for the next few years our job is to yell and scream at governments everywhere to get up off the couch.' Illustration: Robert G Fresson
With the climate talks in Paris now over, the world has set itself a serious goal: limit temperature rise to 1.5C. Or failing that, 2C. Hitting those targets is absolutely necessary: even the one-degree rise that we've already seen is wreaking havoc on everything from ice caps to ocean chemistry. But meeting it won't be easy, given that we're currently on track for between 4C and 5C. Our only hope is to decisively pick up the pace.
In fact, pace is now the key word for climate. Not where we're going, but how fast we're going there. Pace – velocity, speed, rate, momentum, tempo. That's what matters from here on in. We know where we're going now; no one can doubt that the fossil fuel age has finally begun to wane, and that the sun is now shining on, well, solar. But the question, the only important question, is: how fast.
To put it in slightly more familiar terms, think about deciding that you're going to run a marathon. Any healthy person can learn to do it as long as they set a very relaxed pace – in fact, there's a whole club of people who just happily run slowly. Their leader, John Bingham, may be the most popular running writer of our time, with books like No Need for Speed and Marathoning for Mortals. The average finishing time for the Los Angeles marathon: five hours and 15 minutes.
But in the case of the climate talks, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about going fast. Limiting the temperature increase to 1.5C would be like setting a new world record (which is two hours and two minutes); even managing to hold it to 2C would be like running a marathon way under three hours, something only 2% of marathoners ever accomplish. "Running a marathon is hard," running writer Mark Remy has written. "Doing it in less than three hours is really hard. No, I mean hard. Like really freaking hard."
Fracking in North Dakota. ‘You’ve got to stop fracking right away (in fact, that may be the greatest imperative of all, since methane gas does its climate damage so fast).’ Photograph: Les Stone/Corbis
What it requires is devoting yourself single-mindedly to the task. You don't get to drink beer with dinner and run a three-hour marathon. You don't get to skip training days. You go to bed early every night, because you're bone-tired. You have to run even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.
Translated into carbon terms: you don't get to go drilling or mining in new areas, even if you think it might make you lots of money. The Arctic will have to be completely off limits, as will the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming. The pre-salt formations off Brazil, and the oil off the coasts of north America too.
You've got to stop fracking right away (in fact, that may be the greatest imperative of all, since methane gas does its climate damage so fast). You have to start installing solar panels and windmills at a breakneck pace – and all over the world. The huge subsidies doled out to fossil fuel have to end yesterday, and the huge subsidies to renewable energy had better begin tomorrow. You have to raise the price of carbon steeply and quickly, so everyone gets a clear signal to get off of it.
'This industry … is clearly willing to break the planet if it means five or ten more years of business as usual'
At the moment the world has no real plan to do any of those things. It continues to pretend that merely setting the goal has been work enough for the last two decades. Its "training plan" – the text that negotiators agreed on in Paris – is a go-slow regimen that aims for a world 3.5C warmer. Its governments are still listening mostly to the fossil fuel industry, which is the coaching equivalent of Bingham. No Need for Speed could be Exxon's guiding mantra; their analysts have repeatedly told the world that renewables simply can't play a big role until the middle of the century, for instance. If their political might can make that a self-fulfilling prophecy, then we've got no chance at all of hitting any of the targets.
Or here's a case in point: the Obama administration, even as it negotiated the new climate agreement, is flirting with lifting the longstanding ban on oil exports, which would be the equivalent of opening a hundred-odd new coal-fired power plants and operating them for a year. They don't seem to quite get it: from this point on, if you're even slightly serious about meeting these targets, you have to do everything possible. There's no more compromises or trade-offs that can be made. You're no longer negotiating with a bunch of other countries around a conference table. You're negotiating with physics, and physics holds all the good cards.
The world's fossil fuel companies still have five times the carbon we can burn and have any hope of meeting even the 2C target – and they're still determined to burn it. The Koch Brothers will spend $900m on this year's American elections. As we know from the ongoing Exxon scandal, there's every reason to think that this industry will lie at every turn in an effort to hold on to their power – they're clearly willing to break the planet if it means five or perhaps 10 more years of business as usual for them.
So there's no reason to go home from Paris complacent, or even all that optimistic. Left to its own devices, the world is still planning to spend the next decade or two mostly limbering up, engaging in the kind of impressive-looking stretching that runners enjoy at the start line. Meanwhile flood, drought, melt, and more of it all the time. In the past week we've seen people die in record rains from south India to the Lake District of Britain, from the Pacific Northwest of America to the mountains of Norway.
But the powers that be won't be left to their own devices. Think of the ever-growing climate movement as personal trainers – for the next few years our job is to yell and scream at governments everywhere to get up off the couch, to put down the chips, to run faster faster faster. We'll fan out around the world in May to the sites of all the world's carbon bombs; we'll go to jail if we have to. We'll push. And if "personal trainer" doesn't sound fierce enough, then think of us as a pack of wolves. Exxon, we're on your heels. America, China, India – that's us, getting closer all the time. You need speed. It's our only chance.
The world is still on a trajectory to irreversible climate change.
The rhetoric from the Paris climate deal is reassuring, but the atmosphere can't read press releases. The level of carbon in the atmosphere does not respond to declarations of victory.
Illustration: John Shakespeare
The chief driver of dangerous climate change is the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is what creates the "greenhouse" effect of global warming.
So first, a quick reality check of where we're up to. When Dr David Keeling took the first reading of carbon dioxide concentration in the earth's atmosphere at Mauna Loa in Hawaii in 1958, it was 315 parts per million.
A level of up to 350 is safe, we're told by experts. The danger zone begins somewhere in the 400 to 450 range, they tell us.
Beyond 450, the chance of holding global warming to a maximum 2 degrees, the "tipping point" of irreversible change, is only around 50:50, according to the Climate Change Authority. It recommends no more than 415.
By the time the Kyoto Protocol was hailed as humanity's successful response to the challenge of climate change 39 years later, the carbon concentration had reached 363. By the time of the 2009 Copenhagen anticlimax, it was 387.
The level of carbon first moved into the danger zone of 400 ppm on May 9, 2013, according to the US government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which operates the Mauna Loa measuring station.
This was "more than 100 ppm higher than at any time in the last one million years", Charles Miller of NASA pointed out, "and maybe higher than any time in the last 25 million years."
A couple of months ago the son of the original Dr Keeling, Ralph Keeling, who has taken up his father's line of work monitoring carbon levels for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, posed: "Will daily values at Mauna Loa ever fall below 400 ppm again in our lifetimes? I'm prepared to project that they won't."
As delegates in Paris last Friday approached the climax of their negotiations, the Mauna Loa station recorded a carbon concentration of 402 ppm, the latest available at the time of writing.
At the current rate of emissions, the world will reach 450 ppm in 25 years, or 2040, the point where we take our chances on catastrophic climate change, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.
So with this background, let's look at what the Paris agreement accomplished. It declares an aim to keep warming "well below" 2 degrees Celsius, and to "pursue efforts" to keep it to 1.5 degrees.
First, the bad news. As climate activist and economics professor Jeffrey Sachs says: "Cynics will say the agreement is unenforceable. They are right."
On the commitments in the Paris agreement, the world is heading to 450 ppm and beyond. They sentence the planet to a global average temperate rise of 2.7 degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels, according to the UN and other analysts. That is, the world is still on a trajectory to irreversible climate change.
As the ANU climate economist Frank Jotzo puts it: "It's very obvious that there's a massive commitment gap."
So why all the hoopla and champagne popping in Paris? The first element is relief, relief that hope is kept alive, that countries didn't walk out or talks collapse, that all countries voiced support for the overarching aim of limiting warming.
Second is that the deal creates a pathway to possible future success. As Environment Minister Greg Hunt told me: "The Paris meeting won't deliver 2 degrees, but the Paris process will."
The process is the agreed reviews of the carbon-cutting targets, reviews set to occur every five years starting on 2020.
"What matters is the process," says eminent Melbourne University economist Ross Garnaut who reported on climate change for the Rudd government. "It's clear and strong and it has the unanimous support of the international community."
Further, the rules say that the countries can only commit to doing more to cut carbon output, not less – it's a one-way process.
Still, as Garnaut says: "The trajectory of emissions reduction has to be a steep downwards one after 2025 if we are to meet the 2050 commitment," of zero net emissions by 2050.
"That will be especially challenging for countries that have a slower start, such as Australia." Australia, he says, will have to "run faster than other developed nations after 2020.
"This will be possible with little sacrifice to out standard of living. We have the richest renewable energy resources per capita of all developed countries and we have exceptional opportunities for biological sequestration."
Indeed Garnaut sees Australia has a chance to emerge as a "renewable energy superpower if we are half smart about it."
ANU's Jotzo says that if the gap between hope and reality is to be bridged, it will be done largely by the speed of technological advance: "It's progress on technology that makes it all possible."
Garnaut points out that in his 2008 report, he forecast that the cost of producing solar panel would fall by a few percentage point per year. In reality, the cost has fallen by 80per cent in seven years.
So at the heart of the Paris agreement is a gamble on technological solutions.
It's an enormous chance to take with the planet. The earth's atmosphere will be impressed only if the gamble pays off.
