The Economist
IN JUNE 1988
scientists, environmental activists and politicians gathered in Toronto
for a
“World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere”.
The aspect of its
changing that alarmed them most was the build-up of carbon dioxide, a
greenhouse gas. In the late 1950s, when systematic monitoring of the
atmosphere’s carbon-dioxide level began, it stood at around 315 parts
per million (ppm). By that summer, it had reached 350ppm—and a heatwave
was bringing record temperatures to much of North America.
The week before the Toronto conference James Hansen, a climate scientist at
NASA, had pointed to the heatwave when telling the
US
Senate that it was time “to stop waffling…and say that the evidence is
pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here”. The Toronto
conference took a similar view, calling for an international effort to
reduce global carbon-dioxide emissions by 20% by 2005.
A
mere four years later a global compact against climate change had been
signed. Even with a boost from the end of the cold war, which made
global action on shared concerns seem newly possible and provided an
opening for a new eschatology to replace that of nuclear Armageddon,
that seemed like a remarkable political success on the part of those
pressing for action.
Unfortunately, a
global agreement to act is not the same thing as global action. Fossil
fuels are the bedrock of industrial society. Even though the alternative
of renewable energy has, since 1988, become far more plausible, a
decisive move away from fossil carbon still means a wrenching and
unprecedented shift.
To many convinced
environmentalists that shift seems self-evidently worthwhile. It fits
with an ideology that commits them to lives that have less impact on the
natural world. But in the face of climate change, individual
willingness to sacrifice the fruits of a high-energy lifestyle is not
enough. People, and countries, that do not share such motivations must
act, too.
The challenge of climate
politics is to overcome these differences by negotiating ways forward
that can gain general assent. It is a challenge that, despite those
remarkable four years, has not been met. Instead of emissions in 2005
being 20% lower than they were in 1988, they were 34% higher. By 2017
they were 22% higher still.
Think global, act global
The
Toronto attendees’ belief that an international agreement could bring
down carbon-dioxide emissions rested in part on an agreement reached a
year before to limit the production of ozone-destroying chemicals, most
notable among them the chlorofluorocarbons (
CFCs) used in fridges and spray-cans. That Montreal protocol looked like a template in two ways.
The
first was that it was global. Since the 1960s the environmental
movement had increasingly taken “saving the planet” as its rhetorical
focus. But practical environmental protections, such as clean-air
regulations, almost all worked on a national, or at most regional,
basis. Because the world’s
CFCs are thoroughly mixed
together before they reach the stratosphere’s ozone layer, the Montreal
protocol had to be genuinely global, and thus balance the needs of
developed and developing countries.
The
second was that the Montreal protocol required remarkable faith in
science. Unlike most pollution controls, which try to reduce harm
already being done, it called for expensive action to deal with a
problem that, despite the dramatic discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole
in 1985, was not yet hurting people. It was based instead on the
likelihood of future catastrophe.
Climate
scientists realised that an emissions-reduction agreement on greenhouse
gases would need a similarly strong consensus on their dangers. This
led to the creation in late 1988 of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (
IPCC). Including researchers from governments, academia, industry and non-governmental organisations, the processes of the
IPCC required governments to sign off on its conclusions, so reducing their ability to ignore them.
The
IPCC’s
first assessment of climate-change science, published in 1990,
predicted that if greenhouse-gas emissions continued to rise unchecked,
the world would warm by 0.2-0.5°C (0.4-0.9°F) every decade over the
course of the 21st century, and that sea-level would rise 3-10cm a
decade. Changes in the three decades since fit with the low end of both
predictions.
Two years later, at an “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, the
UN’s members agreed on a framework convention on climate change (
UNFCCC)
which committed them to the “stabilisation of greenhouse-gas
concentrations…at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic
interference with the climate system”.
Despite
the fact that such stabilisation implied impressive cuts in emissions,
the treaty set no targets along the lines of Toronto’s 20% by 2005. They
were to be worked out later. In years to come those negotiations on
emission cuts came to dominate discussions between the parties to the
treaty, sidelining the vital question of how to help countries,
especially poor ones, adapt to the now inevitable changes. To talk of
such adaptation was equated with capitulating on emission cuts.
Specific
emission cuts were agreed upon five years after Rio, in Kyoto. They
were not global in extent, applying only to developed countries, which
were responsible for most of the emissions. They were not ambitious
either. And the Kyoto protocol was never ratified by America, then the
largest global emitter.
The
UN imprimatur gave the
UNFCCC universal legitimacy. But fashioning a treaty that all could accept had meant producing one with little practical power. The
UNFCCC lacked any mechanism for making countries commit to ambitious action, let alone binding them to such commitments.
If
all countries had shared an urgent interest in action, those
shortcomings would not have mattered. But they did not. The costs of
environmental improvements tend to fall on a few groups—typically, those
doing the polluting. In domestic environmental politics, progress
typically relies on going some way to placate those groups while
increasing the enthusiasm for action among others and the public.
If emissions had been down to just a few companies, as with
CFCs,
or sectors of the economy, as with the smogs tackled by clean-air acts,
such trade-offs might have been possible internationally. But
fossil-fuel use permeated rich economies. Those countries knew the cost
of reducing them could be severe—and that the benefits would accrue
mostly to people in other countries and future times.
These
difficulties were exacerbated by attempts to weaken public support for
climate action. Fossil-fuel companies and their political allies,
understood how important a scientific consensus on future damage was to
the case for action. The result was a campaign to make the science look
at best dubious, and at worst fraudulent, which went beyond noting that
many environmental scientists were committed environmentalists and
pointing out truly open questions (the wide range of the uncertainties
in the first
IPCC report has been slow to narrow). In
doing so it helped produce an environment in which some right-wing
politicians felt able to oppose all cuts to emissions, with notable
successes in America and Australia.
Future targets beat present action
Another source of resistance to emissions reduction was the rise of China. Its
GDP,
measured at purchasing-power parity and in real terms, increased
sevenfold in the 20 years after Rio. Its carbon-dioxide emissions more
than tripled, from 2.7bn to 9.6bn tonnes. China showed no real interest
in curbing this world-changing side effect, and because it was a
developing country it was not even notionally obliged to do so by the
Kyoto protocol—despite the fact that, before that protocol was ten years
old, China was a bigger emitter than America. Resentment over this was
one of the reasons some developed countries became increasingly unhappy
with their commitments. China’s unwillingness to offer real action
contributed to the near collapse of attempts to move beyond Kyoto at the
Copenhagen summit of 2009.
Six years after Copenhagen, though, the
UN
process made its biggest step forward since Rio: the Paris agreement.
This, at last, set a specific global target. Atmospheric greenhouse-gas
levels were to be stabilised by the second half of this century at a
level that would see an increase of the average global temperature over
its preindustrial level well below 2°C, with strenuous efforts made to
keep it down to 1.5°C. All the countries, developed and developing, that
signed were required to commit to domestic actions towards that aim.
There
were several reasons for the success: prior talks between America and
China; skilful French diplomacy; canny negotiation by developing
countries. Perhaps the most important one, though, was that the cost of
renewable energy was tumbling and investments in the field booming.
Reducing emissions while continuing high-energy lifestyles felt newly
possible.
Perhaps it will be. But the
reductions the countries offered in Paris were too small to meet the 2°C
target. That insufficiency has seen a new generation of climate
activists demand greater ambition at the next big
UNFCCC
meeting, originally to be held this year in Glasgow but now postponed
because of the covid-19 pandemic. There remains no way for them to force
action on people and countries who do not share their passion and
commitment.
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