The final Paris document consists of a twelve-page
“Agreement” and a twenty-page “Adoption” text. The former outlines most of the
substantive steps that were agreed to by the 195 countries represented in Paris
and the latter describes just how they will be implemented.
Francois Hollande praised the Paris Agreement as
“ambitious,” “binding,” and “universal.” Ban Ki-moon said it ushers in a “new
era of global cooperation,” and UN climate convention executive secretary
Christiana Figueres described it as “an agreement of solidarity with the most vulnerable.”
Barack Obama waxed triumphant and proclaimed the outcome a testament to
American leadership in diplomacy and technology.
Friends of the Earth International, on the other hand,
immediately denounced the agreement as a “sham of a deal,” adding that the most
vulnerable people around the world would “feel the worst impacts of our
politicians’ failure to take tough enough action.” The renowned elder climate
scientist James Hansen called it a “fraud,” adding, “It’s just bullshit for
them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better
every five years.’ It’s just worthless words.” British climatologist Kevin
Anderson, among the most politically forthright of current scientists,
described the agreement as “weaker than Copenhagen” and “not consistent with
the latest science.” In the Agreement is the omission of any steps to regulate
rising pollution levels from international shipping and aviation. This was one
of the key issues cited by Anderson when he compared the Paris outcome
unfavorably with Copenhagen’s. While these emissions now amount to only 4.4
percent of the world’s total, according to the Wall Street Journal, they are
projected to grow rapidly, even as other emissions sources are beginning to
decline.
More moderate in their criticisms were key figures such as
Kumi Naidoo of Greenpeace International, who described the agreement as “one
step on a long road …, but it is progress,” and 350.org’s Bill McKibben, who
emphasized the agreement’s underlying challenge to the supremacy of the fossil
fuel industry. “This didn’t save the planet,” McKibben wrote, “but it may have
saved the chance of saving the planet,” in part by challenging the growing
climate justice movement to keep moving forward. Guardian columnist George
Monbiot view was that “By comparison to what it could have been, it’s a
miracle. By comparison to what it should have been, it’s a disaster.”
Those who are praise the Paris Climate Change agreement and
those who point to its shortcomings live in almost entirely different worlds. One
world is dominated by the protocols of international diplomacy, a world that couldn’t
be farther removed from the places where the impacts of continuing climate
chaos are felt the most. In that world, people are working harder year by year
to grow food and sustain their lives in the face of an increasingly unstable
global climate. They struggle through seasons of devastating floods, droughts
and wildfires that become more intense every year. The groundwater in numerous
small island nations is increasingly contaminated by saltwater from rising seas
and some Arctic communities are literally collapsing into the melting
permafrost.
The means for limiting average global warming to 1.5 or 2
degrees are largely aspirational, and this is reflected in the agreement’s
language throughout. Words like “clarity,” “transparency,” “integrity,”
“consistency,” and “ambition” appear throughout the text, but there’s very
little to assure that these aspirations can be realized. UN staff are to create
all manner of global forums, working groups and expert panels to move the
discussions forward but, as was clear prior to Paris, the main focus is to
instill a kind of moral obligation to drive diplomats and their governments to
take further steps. Article 15 of the agreement proposes a “mechanism to
facilitate implementation and promote compliance,” but this takes the form of an
internationally representative “expert-based” committee that is to be
“transparent, non-adversarial and non-punitive.” This compliance “mechanism” is
described in three short sentences in the main Agreement and another couple of
paragraphs in the Adoption document; as predicted, there’s nothing to legally
pressure intransigent countries or corporations to do much of anything. Paragraph
17 of the Adoption document admits that current national “contributions” fall
considerably short of a 2 degree goal, much less 1.5 degrees and a later
paragraph “invites” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to
study the specific impacts of warming above 1.5 degrees. There is no explicit
goal of “decarbonization”, even though it was part of the pre-Paris
conversation for a time. Article 4 of the final agreement, however, stating
that total emissions should peak “as soon as possible,” fall rapidly
thereafter, and aim for a “balance” between sources and sinks of greenhouse
gases sometime after 2050. This represents a substantive step back from the
goal of decarbonization and echoes the IPCC’s 2014 policy report, which
promoted highly speculative carbon capture technologies as a means to
compensate for continued fossil fuel use. This approach also bolsters largely
fraudulent carbon offset markets (see below) and could enable a host of
outlandish geoengineering schemes that would only further destabilize the
earth’s climate systems.
How climate mitigations in the global South will be financed
was postponed once again to next year’s planned conference in Morocco, with the
document “strongly urging” developed countries to fulfill Obama and Hillary
Clinton’s 2009 Copenhagen promise of $100 billion per year in climate-related
financing by 2020. By 2025, countries are to “set a new collective quantified
goal from a floor of USD 100 billion per year,” but there’s a distinct lack of
agreement about what actually counts as climate finance. Global South delegates
insist that rich world is obligated to fund non-polluting energy developments
in impoverished regions in order to help curtail their continued economic
dependence on fossil fuels, but northern diplomats prefer to emphasize
“public-private partnerships,” seek credit for existing aid and loan programs,
and have proposed countless other loopholes. The documents are full of calls
for new information-sharing platforms, but are virtually silent on how rich
countries can ever be held to their implied financial commitments.
Even more disappointing was the language on “loss and damage,”
i.e. how countries will be compensated for the continuing destruction of
life-sustaining infrastructure in the face of accelerating warming. India’s
Business Standard reported halfway through the Paris conference that the US had
proposed to “recognize the importance of averting and minimizing loss and
damage from climate change,” but only “on a cooperative [sic] basis that does
not involve liability and compensation.” The final text (Article 8) is a bit
more specific in describing those losses and damages, but paragraph 52 of the
Adoption text states specifically that “Article 8 … does not involve or provide
a basis for any liability or compensation.”
On the Monday immediately following the Paris conference,
the New York Times, “If nothing else, analysts and experts say, the accord is a
signal to businesses and investors that the era of carbon reduction has
arrived.” Indeed Peabody Energy reported a nearly 13 percent decline in its
share value that week and a prominent solar stock index was up 4.5 percent. The
Times predicted more bankruptcies in the coal sector and reminded readers of
the public support for a carbon tax announced last spring by four leading
European oil companies. Major coal-dependent utilities are diversifying into
large solar projects and Ford is working to expand its fleet of electric cars.
More than $3 trillion in financial assets have been divested from fossil fuels
in just a few years. The recent congressional deal on taxes and spending
included an unanticipated five-year extension of tax credits for solar and wind
projects, and Bloomberg News predicted that this could spur a doubling of
current US capacity. But energy markets are fickle and levels of renewable
energy investment have fluctuated widely in recent years. The persistent decline
in oil prices has helped shut down some of the most troubling new exploration
efforts, such as in Alaska, but it also makes investments in renewables appear
less favorable. While the expansion of renewable energy promises a boom in
“green jobs” and may help facilitate the “just transition” alluded to in the
Paris text, large renewable energy projects can be highly resource- and
capital-intensive. For example, to meet the ambitious renewable energy goals
proposed by Mark Jacobson and his research group at Stanford University would
require some 1.7 billion new energy installations worldwide, from modest
rooftop systems to massive solar and wind farms. While Jacobson and his
colleagues have demonstrated the feasibility of meeting all current energy needs
by mid-century with genuinely renewable energy (no nuclear, no biomass, no new
mega-hydro), some questions remain as to both the environmental and economic
feasibility of an expansion of renewables on that scale.
It appears that most new renewable capacity may still be
adding to the total energy mix rather than replacing fossil fuels. A 2012 study
suggested that just a quarter of non-fossil energy replaces fossil fuels, and
only a tenth of non-fossil electricity; all the rest is simply adding more
capacity to the system. When it comes to saving energy, corporations are still
reluctant to commit significant capital; a study described in the New York
Times concluded that most companies insist on a two-year payback for
investments aimed to increase the energy efficiency of their operations. A
pre-Paris discussion paper from San Francisco-based Eco-Equity reported that
direct fossil fuel subsidies – roughly $775 billion worldwide in 2012 – equal
the combined annual cost of a transition away from fossil fuels in developing
countries plus the estimated need to fund adaptation, losses and damages from
climate change. Clearly, it will require more than statements of ambitious
climate goals to corral the overarching capitalist imperative to grow and expand,
or even to rein in political pressures to keep diverting public funds to
support fossil fuel corporations.
Faced with the disappointment of the Paris agreement, environmentalists
must come to realise that the time has come to talk about people, not statistics.
Climate change will not be until the question of who controls our future is
resolved. The world will continue to wait for meaningful action by those in
power. Our ruling class are in fact unable to alter their way of doing things
even when they want to. Some say the corporations
will invest in the future (alternative energy) meanwhile others say corporations
will hold on to the past (fossil fuels.) Ending capitalism and its over-riding
priority of making profits is in fact our only hope and our only solution. The
outcome of COP 21 reveals how the planet is subordinate to institutions of
profit.
Further reading: ‘We’ll always have Paris…’
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