Stopping climate change requires both state power and international cooperation. Regarding the former, the contemporary left seems broadly in agreement: Christian Parenti persuasively argues in Dissent that “it is this society and these institutions that must cut emissions.” Likewise, Alyssa Battistoni opens Jacobin’s recent climate-focused issue by explicitly rejecting the idea that we should wait for the revolution to deal with climate change. Instead, the Left should secure “more democratic political control over industry, technology, and infrastructure; more conscious intention about how we build our world, why, and for whom.” [...]
Yet this internationalist commitment is rarely matched with an equivalent enthusiasm for the actually existing mechanism for interstate cooperation: the Paris Climate Agreement (PA). On the contrary, the Left holds a uniformly negative view of the agreement, in arguments that range from trenchant critique to outright hostility. [...]
Most importantly, while targets are nationally determined, the agreement makes it clear that no country may reduce a target once it has been set. Parties must “maintain” the target they have set (Article 4.2) and submit a new one every five years (Article 4.9). Each new target must reflect both a “progression” from the existing one and the country’s “highest possible ambition” in light of its national capacity (Article 4.3). Countries may revise their target at any time “with a view to enhancing [the target’s] level of ambition” (Article 4.11). No country can go backward: the world cannot afford it, and the PA doesn’t allow it. [...]
The most the Paris Agreement can do is to make these investments rational — no small thing at all. Crucially, however, it can only do this if it has a credible chance of matching what the science requires. Interpretations that bolster its odds are available but, thanks to recent events, far from entrenched. If it becomes clear that the Paris Agreement will not create the kind of international solidarity necessary, statist thinking will take us to some very dark places indeed.
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