If there is a significant breakthrough at this conference it is much less likely to be about bending emissions curves and accelerating decarbonization than it is to be about dealing with a world ravaged by climate impacts — establishing some form of institutionalized climate finance for the vulnerable and underresourced nations of the developing world, which have done least to create the problems they face now and in the decades ahead. These vulnerable nations are focusing on forms of climate reparations because they are convinced that dangerous disruption is inevitable. Indeed, they are here already, with more and more scientists expressing open fear at the intensity of today’s impact and worrying about what unexpected transformations may await at 1.5 degrees or just above.
That level of warming, and the rate of decarbonization required to achieve it, has provided the architecture for nearly all global ambition undertaken over the last half-decade. And how plausible is it in the end? To give the world a 66 percent chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, conventional climate science suggests a carbon budget of 280 gigatons — just seven years of current emissions. Even in its rosy report, the I.E.A. projects that we won’t even reach a peak until later this decade, which means that for much of the next seven years we should expect to be emitting more carbon than we are today. Possibly, the turn could come even later: The I.E.A. chief Fatih Birol said “we now see a peak around 2030 for all fossil fuels,” but the projected decline is slow thereafter, with total fossil fuel use not dropping to around 2010 levels until after 2050 in its “stated policies” scenario.
And while cutting emissions more aggressively now would mean more time to ultimately get all the way to zero emissions, what that requires in the short term already looks daunting.
For a 66 percent chance of limiting warming to two degrees there is a longer timeline than for the 1.5 target, but not much longer — that full carbon budget would be exhausted in 26 years of current emissions. From now, emissions would have to drop globally by 5 percent every year, still a much faster drop than has ever been engineered globally in any year by anything but the Covid-19 pandemic. This is why the climate scientist Glen Peters often says, cheekily, that 1.5 degrees may be impossible and two degrees only extremely hard, with 2.5 degrees, relatively speaking, “a walk in the park.”
When you look at charts plotting climate promises made by the nations of the world, they tell a relatively reassuring story, with Climate Action Tracker’s analysis suggesting that, if fully implemented, those promises could deliver a global temperature rise below two degrees, with a central estimate landing at 1.8 degrees.
But those headline promises paper over an enormous amount of sketchy accounting. A separate Climate Action Tracker analysis of 37 countries and the European Union, which account for the vast majority of world emissions combined, finds that none has a climate policy even “compatible” with a 1.5-degree goal. According to the Land Gap report released Nov. 1, global climate pledges by countries require reforestation and other sequestration measures taking up more land than the entire United States — indeed, require using as much land to sequester carbon as is used to produce all the world’s croplands today. The world’s governments are planning twice as much fossil fuel development as would be consistent with 1.5-degree goals, and 93 percent of corporations with net-zero pledges are off track to meet them.
For decades, those worrying about the geopolitics of climate change would often drift into debates about possible enforcement mechanisms, worrying that nations would be simply unwilling to move on their own. The world has changed more recently, with a moralistic model of decarbonization as a necessary burden giving way to a green energy arms race defined by new competition and rivalry. Even so, ambition is woefully lagging, and in a world full of climate promises without any meaningful leadership for carbon-based sanctions, enforcement looks less like planetary governance forcing countries and corporations to move faster than like finding ways to hold them to their own promises.