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Countries are back-pedaling away from their climate commitments as fast as they can. Ten years after the Paris Agreement on reducing emissions—which as, David Wallace-Wells notes, had been treated by the U.N.’s Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, “as though its significance approached, if not exceeded, that of the U.N. charter itself”—leaders of major countries can’t even be bothered to show up at the U.N.’s annual climate change conferences. For the upcoming November conference in Brazil (COP30), the overwhelming majority of countries have not submitted formal decarbonization plans and, of those that have, most are not compatible with the ambitious goals laid out by the Paris Agreement.
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The U.S. is not back-pedaling, but sprinting, away from its climate commitments. The Trump administration pulled out of the Paris Agreement and has eviscerated Biden-era climate policy, including the elimination of subsidies for wind, solar and electric vehicles. There has been a thunderous lack of protest to these moves other than press releases from climate NGOs and garment-rending jeremiads from the usual suspects like Bill McKibben.
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Despite decades of well-funded programs, mandates and targets, global progress on eliminating fossil fuels has been extremely slow. Today, 81 percent of world primary energy consumption still comes from fossil fuels and only 15 percent from renewables, less than half of which comes from wind and solar. The renewables share is higher for electricity generation, 32 percent, but electricity only accounts for 21 percent of global energy consumption. //
The euphoria of the 2015 Paris Agreement has run into the harsh realities of a global energy system based largely around fossil fuels that is very, very hard to change quickly. Nor should we wish to do so given the likely associated costs. As Vaclav Smil points out:
[W]e are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years. Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat…
And as he tartly observes re the 2050 deadline:
People toss out these deadlines without any reflection on the scale and the complexity of the problem…What’s the point of setting goals which cannot be achieved? People call it aspirational. I call it delusional.
This reality has begun to sink in for political leaders around the world. Not only is net-zero by 2050 not going to happen but their constituents have a remarkable lack of interest in seeing this goal attained. In the United States, voters view climate change as a third tier issue, vastly prioritize the cost and reliability of energy over its effect on the climate and, if action on climate change it to be taken, are primarily concerned with the effect of such actions on consumer costs and economic growth. Making fast progress toward net-zero barely registers. //
Roger Pielke Jr.’s “iron law of climate policy”—that when policies focused on economic concerns confront policies focused on emissions reductions, it is economic concerns that will win out every time—remains undefeated. //
