By H. Sterling Burnett
The Paris Climate Agreement was flawed; doomed to fail from its inception. It is long past time for all parties to it and the media to acknowledge this fact.
The mainstream media have bemoaned the Paris Agreement’s fate since Donald Trump’s reelection. Trump took the United States out of the Paris Agreement during his first term, and vowed to do so again after President Biden put America back into the agreement. While Trump withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement was a visible and public rebuke of the pact, undermining its “effectiveness,” in point of fact, the agreement was dead even before the ink of the last signature on it was dry.
Physics, economic, and social realities on the ground, and the structure of the treaty itself ensured that the Paris Agreement would be ineffective in preventing greenhouse gas emissions from rising.
As I noted shortly after the time of its completion in 2015, even those who developed the agreement at the time quietly acknowledged that emission reduction pledges made by the signatory countries would be insufficient to keep temperatures below the 2.0℃ threshold. By their accounting at the time, if every party to the agreement actually cut emissions by the amount they agreed to, it would result in less than half the greenhouse gas cuts required to halt temperatures at the upper limit of 2.0 degrees. By 2017, the UN reported that even if every country abides by its Paris commitments, a dubious proposition at best, temperatures would still rise by 3 degrees C by 2100.
Also dooming the Paris Agreement is the fact, as reported by the BBC, that a number of countries are openly discussing not keeping their commitments. Mind you, those same countries have failed to keep their commitments so far, but now they are openly conversing about it. Argentina, Indonesia (a top 10 global CO2 emitter), South Africa (Africa’s largest emitter), and South Korea, among other countries supposedly committed to reining in fossil fuel use and cutting their emissions, are now openly saying they will increase production of coal, natural gas, and oil. Moreover, they hope to import those products from the United States.
They are blaming Trump for their decision, but the data show that every single country now saying they want more fossil fuels was, in fact, increasing its use of fossil fuels long before Trump was reelected and pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement. In fact, no country that set specific targets for emission reductions in the first Paris commitment period has made significant progress toward meeting its goals.
Further evidence the Paris Agreement is dead has been reported by Yahoonews.com. Of the nearly 200 countries that signed the Paris agreement, only 10 submitted their updated carbon reduction commitments by the deadline. That makes 190 scofflaws. Also, even those 10 have failed to meet their previous carbon reduction commitments.
It also bears noting that two of the three biggest carbon dioxide emitters in the world, China and India, have no firm commitments under the Paris Agreement. Rather than promising to cut emissions, they vaguely said that they expect at some point in the future to see their emissions peak. If CO2 emissions are driving climate change, China’s emissions trajectory — which has grown steadily since 2015 — would ensure more atmospheric CO2 in 2030 and 2050, regardless of what the rest of the world did or did not do.
Another compelling reason that the Paris Agreement was bound to fail was aptly described by philosopher Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan: “Covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.” That describes each and every climate agreement developed thus far, in a nutshell.
The Paris Agreement was never a binding treaty. Under its terms, the nearly 200 nations that signed were supposed to set individualized targets to reduce or cap carbon dioxide emissions. However, none of those goals, or even the commitment to set such goals, was enforceable internationally. Unless and until the individual countries actually enact the targets through domestic law, they aren’t even binding within the legal system of any individual country.
In the end, the Paris Agreement requires sacrifice, sustained and deep sacrifice, for no discernable gain. Politicians want to stay in power and are loathe to stay a policy course that visibly harms their constituents for payoffs decades after they are out of office. That is the main, realpolitik reason the Paris Climate Agreement was doomed from day one. Now is the time to speak its eulogy, without regret. The trillions of dollars wasted to date on it are sunk costs, but at least we can now cease throwing good money after bad.