Saving the Paris Agreement

During the United Nations climate negotiations in Katowice, Poland, in December, the cavernous modern convention center at the heart of this grim industrial city was like a spaceship in coal country. Outside, the air was so sulfurous and polluted it gave at least one negotiator a nosebleed as they walked from their hotel to the conference center.

Katowice is the coal capital of the European Union, where hills are hollowed out with mines and the livelihoods of some 90,000 workers are dependent on what the Polish prime minister has called “black gold.” Inside the center, thousands of climate negotiators in dark suits — many of whom had likely never seen a chunk of coal in their lives — scurried down echoing hallways and engaged in long meetings about arcane differences in the language of a document designed to stop the world from burning fossil fuels and save civilization from itself. For 23 years now, climate negotiators have been holding meetings like this, producing millions of hours of talk and millions of pages of documents. And for 23 years, the world has edged closer to climate catastrophe. In Katowice, that failure was apparent with every breath you took.

The task for diplomats in Katowice seemed, at first glance, simple: Flesh out the rules for the Paris Agreement, the landmark 2015 accord in which virtually every nation in the world agreed to voluntarily take action to limit warming to 2 C (3.6 F). What metric will be used to count greenhouse-gas emissions in each country? Which sectors (power plants, vehicles, industrial, etc.) will be counted? Who will verify that the reporting is accurate? These questions might sound trivial, but getting them right is the difference between saving the world and an accounting scam. It is all the more tricky because greenhouse-gas emissions can be seen as a proxy for economic growth, and the notion that a nation like China would allow Americans — or anyone else — to poke around and verify these numbers, sort of the way that nuclear-arms inspectors poke around a missile base, is not easy to accept. Especially given that the U.S. and China are in the midst of a trade war.

But the biggest threat to the climate agreement in Katowice wasn’t paranoid leaders worried about other nations spying on economic data. It was the impulsive stupidity of President Donald Trump, who, as he has made clear in dozens of remarks and tweets, is a shameless and unrepentant climate denier. After Trump spent his presidential campaign touting the wonders of coal, it surprised no one that a few months after being sworn into office he announced he was pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement. By the terms of the agreement itself, the U.S. can’t officially leave until 2020. But Trump, who has zero respect for such norms, could have ordered the State Department not to send a team of negotiators to Katowice. Without the largest economy in the world present, the conference would have been rendered meaningless. Trump also could have sent a team of negotiators with instructions to blow up the talks, as he had blown up the G7 agreement last year. If the Katowice meeting had collapsed, it would have been the end of any global effort to limit carbon pollution for the foreseeable future.

-more-

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/saving-the-paris-agreement-780473/