The New York Review of Books: The Paris Catastrophe

Even the most skilled chairperson would have failed at Paris, however, were it not for years of hard work and preparation by some participants. The efforts of Presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping, representing the US and China respectively and together the largest emitters of greenhouse gases globally, were crucial in this regard, as was the work of many in Europe, India, and the small island nations. Without their efforts, we might still be without an international agreement on climate change.

The fact that the agreement took so long to broker, however, has come at considerable cost. Had the world agreed on an approach to dealing with climate change at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, we would have had a much easier path to decarbonizing the economy and avoiding 2⁰C of warming (which is widely accepted in political negotiations as the threshold of dangerous climate change). Had we reached an agreement in Copenhagen, we might still have been able to stay below 2⁰C simply by cutting emissions of greenhouse gases hard and fast. But the roughly 50 gigatons of CO2 equivalent emitted each year since then have made it all but impossible to avoid 2⁰C solely by cutting emissions. In order to meet the goals agreed to in Paris, we will need to develop ways of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere at enormous scale. (The agreement aims at limiting warming to between 1.5 and 2⁰C. My recent book Atmosphere of Hope outlines the technologies and methods available to reduce CO2 at the gigaton scale.) [...]

Even more dangerous for the US, I think, is the opportunity offered to China by Trump vacating the field of climate action. China’s success in cornering the lion’s share of the global solar panel market should act as a warning to the US that success in manufacturing in the modern world requires more than hard work and entrepreneurship. It also requires clear, long-term investment signals from governments that understand the complexities of the energy transition and are willing to work with leading industries to achieve regulation that optimizes the chances of success. Without such government action, Denmark would never have been able to pioneer wind power technology, nor would China have succeeded in dominating the solar panel market.

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