After 20 years of UN negotiations on how to combat climate change, anyone still living in a fantasy world of climate change denial is now stuck firmly in the past.
Yet the real deception is said to have unfolded before our very eyes on the world stage in Paris, according to Friends of the Earth International. The environment group fears climate change will hit harder than we imagine. They are not alone in claiming that the Paris agreement failed to deliver.
International conferences cannot cut emissions. They can only set a framework to encourage businesses to go for a low-carbon economy, but will it happen? A ‘ratchet mechanism’ will oblige countries to review what more they can do to tackle climate change every five years. But while the deal is being described as legally binding, countries can withdraw from it without consequence.
Euphoric applause brought the climate summit to a close. US President Barack Obama described it as a “victory for all the planet”. Clearly, world leaders at the climate talks, which wrapped up on December 11, could not be seen to be walking away from a collapsed summit, as they did in Copenhagen in 2009. With the window narrowing on our chances to save the planet from climate chaos, it had to be a success – and so it was to a certain extent.
In a statement that contrasted sharply with the hype, James Hansen – the grandfather of global awareness on climate change – spoke candidly to The Guardian of his disappointment over the warming threat not being made a top priority by Obama after he was elected on just such a pledge. Equally, he poured scorn on some (not all) of Republicans who unhelpfully refuse to accept all evidence that the world is warming due to human activity.
Time has now nearly run out for limiting global warming to safe levels. Climate scientist Kevin Anderson of the UK’s Tyndall Centre said it is a very small window and if the world waits another four years it will be “too late”.
As far back as 1988, George Woodwell, director of the Woods Hole research centre in Massachusetts, had noted that the rate of global warming was uncertain. He was hopeful that a slower warming trend would allow human life on Earth a better chance to respond.
Twenty-five years on, Woodwell was still urging that the US President extract himself from a seemingly permanent sense of crisis, brought about by world events (notably the Benghazi murder of a US Ambassador at the time) which competed with the impending climate change crisis for news headlines.
While the deal is being described as legally binding, countries can withdraw from it without consequence
In 2013, Woodwell spoke out again over the threat of climatic disruption and the absolute necessity of deflecting it if this generation is to have a future.
“The global addiction to fossil fuels has been allowed to run its course beyond the limits of safety, to the moment when climatic change is tipping beyond the point of reversibility,” he said. “Past that point, the feedbacks will be in control and the Earth will warm by many degrees despite our attempts to mitigate the process. The seas will rise, continents will bake, flooding and chaos will reign. The timing for these changes is not the indefinite future. It is in the lifetimes of people now living.
“We have powerful resources in the form of scientific insights and talents and energy. But we must be led and fed with political insights and skill, and that is where Obama has failed us. It is true that this President has been repeatedly rebuffed by a House of Representatives dominated by a faction of Republicans who believe in neither government nor science and who have done their best to dismantle both.
“But no one should yield to such vandalism, least of all a President. He can and must call on those colleagues to join him in a rapid national, and ultimately international, shift away from fossil fuels toward a world of renewable energy.”
At the beginning of this month, as Obama attended Paris climate talks, Republicans blocked Environment Protection Agency rules put to the US Senate to curb emissions in power plants. (The resolution is likely to be overturned by veto.)
As the rhetoric of ‘victory’ fades in the wake of the Paris summit, what real action to stave off climate change can be expected?
Getting 196 countries to agree on a deal that seemed ‘unthinkable’ just a few months ago was certainly a remarkable achievement. Hailed as an extraordinary diplomatic effort and the best deal possible that could have been reached, the final agreement to keep warming at well below 2°C appears ambitious.
Yet observers, who have long been aware of the threat that an overall emissions-driven warming poses to our planet, say the international climate deal may still not be enough to save the world from a future of its own making.
Negotiators spent two weeks deciding whether to go for 2°C or lower the temperature bar while wrangling over the amount of money that vulnerable countries, on the receiving end of the worst effects of climate change, may be a given as compensation.
The Marshall Islands’ foreign minister expressed fears that a global temperature rise of over 1.5 °C would be a death warrant for his country perched just two metres above sea level. Anything higher could see the low-lying atolls gradually go under the waves and 70,000 people evacuated as refugees.
But is a target of 1.5 °C deliverable… or even compatible with democracy? These crucial questions have been put by Hansen, the scientist who discovered the greenhouse effect back in the 1970s, along with co-workers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). In 1988 he told a US Senate committee on energy and natural resources (fossil fuels) that climate change had begun.
At first Hansen’s testimony on NASA’s research findings caused the US Congress to sit up and take notice. Responding to the findings, Democratic senator Tim Wirth (founder of the ‘cap and trade’ concept, which led to the US Clean Air Act) declared the scientific evidence to be compelling.
Following Hansen’s momentous congressional hearing, the New York Times came out with the radical suggestion that there should be a “sharp reduction in the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels that release carbon dioxide”.
Hansen claims that subsequent testimony given by him to Congress in 1989 was altered and that NASA appointed a media overseer who vetted what he said to the press.
Commenting on the Paris talks last week, Hansen has said little progress will be made if greenhouse gas emissions are not taxed across the board, forcing down emissions quickly enough to avoid the worst ravages of climate change. He has proposed a fee of $15 (€14) a tonne to rise by $10 (€9) yearly. However, the concept has been shunned not just by big industry but also by ‘big green’, a term used by as Hansen to refer to some of America’s established environment groups.
More than half the world’s population lives near or on the coast. Many major cities are at risk from the consequences of climate change, and the economic cost of continuing with a business-as-usual approach to emissions is incalculable, according to Hansen.
He said: “It will become questionable whether global governance will break down. You are talking about hundreds of millions of climate refugees from places such as Pakistan and China. We just can’t let that happen. Civilisation was set up and developed with a stable, constant coastline.”
Keeping the planet as habitable as it is today will take nothing less than a worldwide revolution.
International aviation and shipping were excluded from the Paris discussions but will need to be tackled within the next few years.
China, where there is no denial that climate change is happening and a strong need to move to clean energies to solve bad air pollution problems, offers a glimmer of hope. All the same, no country can act alone and co-operation is needed.
Malta may appear too small to matter on the global scale, but we could certainly benefit from measures to combat climate change if the amount of pollution on our roads can be reduced. The good news is that energy efficiency is the fastest, easiest and most cost-effective path to meeting CO2 emissions reduction goals, so we can all make a start with our individual actions.