[font face=Serif][font size=5]A Plan B for Climate Agreements[/font]

[font size=4] U.N. negotiations are going nowhere, and greenhouse-gas emissions are soaring. It’s time to move on.[/font]

[font size=3]By Kevin Bullis on June 12, 2014

In 2007, just before he accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Rajendra Pachauri, the organization’s leader, declared that the world was running out of time to prevent catastrophic global warming. “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late,” Pachauri told the New York Times. “What we do in the next two or three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

This April, the IPCC released a long-awaited report assessing just how far we’ve come since Pachauri’s stark pronouncement. The news was grim. There has yet to be any sign of the global action that Pachauri and others had desperately sought. In 2007, the IPCC called for emissions to level off by 2015, but the world is emitting greenhouse gases faster than ever. Even now, Pachauri and some other IPCC leaders remain publicly optimistic, saying it’s still possible to avoid catastrophic climate change if we act “very soon.” But delve into the new IPCC report itself and you’ll find a much less hopeful picture.

“What the report overall shows is that the only way you’re going to stop climate change is by assuming that governments will make a whole series of heroic efforts,” says David Victor, director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at the University of California at San Diego and one of the lead authors of the report. For example, if we’re to meet the U.N. goal of limiting the increase in the world’s average temperature to 2 °C above preindustrial levels, all key technologies—wind, solar, nuclear, power plants that capture and store carbon dioxide, and so on—have to scale up quickly, even though some haven’t been growing at all and carbon capture at power plants has yet to be commercially deployed. The report says the world’s governments must also immediately agree to binding and effective climate policies—even though massive efforts over the past two decades have failed to produce any such agreements.

“A lot of publicity was given to the fact that the IPCC says limiting warming is doable,” says Robert Stavins, director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program and also a key IPCC author. But the situation “is not as rosy as it’s been characterized,” he says. “When you introduce political reality, then you’re talking about (2 °C) not being feasible.”

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