What a difference a year can make. 2015 marked a point of great enthusiasm about a turnaround in global climate policy. States signed on to the Paris climate agreement. As with any complex internationally negotiated deal, reactions were mixed. But most at least thought the Paris deal indicated one thing: that countries were politically committed to act on climate change. The outcome of the US election seems to threaten this fragile consensus.
Speaking to the New York Times, Dana Fisher, director of the Programme for Society and the Environment at the University of Maryland, put it bluntly: “The Paris Agreement and any U.S. leadership in international climate progress is dead.” Already vulnerable, US withdrawal from the Paris consensus could put global ambitions out of reach. In turn, a stuttering implementation process brings back an issue often kept under wraps: negative emissions technologies.
Why Paris Was Inadequate Already
Donald Trump has packed his transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency with noted climate change deniers like Myron Ebell. In Scott Pruitt, the agency will be led by someone whose claim to fame is launching multiple lawsuits against it in the past. The astonishing selection of current ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State signals the extent to which fossil fuel companies retain a tight grip over both domestic and foreign policy. Trump’s own track record suggests he probably just does not understand climate change, having to be reassured by Chinese officials it’s not in fact a hoax concocted by them. And Republican majorities in both houses of Congress will ensure that most of the tacit progress made by the Obama Administration will be undone.
While China has surpassed the United States as the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, the United States remains a significant contributor towards annual global emissions. Currently, it is responsible for about 16 percent of them, more than the 28 EU member states and Japan combined. Before the election, Lux Research estimated that two terms of a Trump presidency would lead to 16 percent higher emissions compared to eight years of Clinton. To put these numbers in perspective: Under the Paris Agreement, 21 per cent of expected emissions reductions through 2030 were to come from the United States. That is no longer realistic.
The Paris Agreement is deliberately designed as a mechanism based on the lowest common denominator. After the disaster that was the Kyoto Protocol, negotiators shifted to a different approach that would give everyone an incentive to sign up to the deal. Instead of prescribing specific emissions cuts for individual countries, the Paris deal awards them the freedom to put their own offers on the table.
But countries’ current plans are wildly insufficient to reach the goal of limiting global temperature increases to below 2°C. The imperative for the US was to do more, not less. With a US policy reversal looming, the latter will be the case.
To understand why an agreement that has just come into force is already doomed, let’s take a look at the assumptions underlying the Paris document. To prevent warming past 2°C, carbon concentrations must not exceed 450 parts per million. Currently, the world is on track to reach 450 within 22 years. Temperatures have already increased by almost 0.9°C above pre-industrial levels, and current emissions stocks in the atmosphere mean that another 0.5°C is practically unavoidable.
Climate Action Tracker explains that
[t]he emissions pledge pathway that includes INDCs has over 90% probability of exceeding 2°C, and only a ‘likely’ (>66%) chance of remaining below 3°C this century. The current policy pathways have a higher than 99.5% probability of exceeding 2°C.
States are at least two steps removed from making two degrees a reality. Every participating state has made a certain pledge – so-called intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs) – to reduce emissions by some amount. So these vary from country to country. The United States, for example, has committed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. Taken together, current INDCs would more than likely result in warming above 3°C.
To get everyone on board, the agreement is structured in such a way that enforcement of these pledges is essentially voluntary. For the most part, they are just that: pledges. In order to stay on the 2°C path, countries would have to make serious upgrades to their pledges and then make good on their promises. In a pre-Trump world, the agreement was already questionable. Success depended on countries holding each other to account, progressively producing more and more ambitious emissions commitments.