By Franz Baumann
The writer is President, Academic Council on the United Nations System and Adjunct Professor, Department of Government, Georgetown University, Washington DC. The following text is adaptation of an article from Global Governance Journal.
WASHINGTON, DC | 3 September 2024 (IDN) — For nearly half a century, negotiations in the context of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change have sought to reduce pressures on nature without curtailing the North’s wealth or thwarting the South’s economic development.
Since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, science has become more granular, the global economy has grown phenomenally, greenhouse gas emissions and temperature rises have accelerated rather than slowed, the climate crisis and inequality have become more extreme, and the status quo interests have become more entrenched.
After three lost (wasted, rather) decades, climate mitigation is terribly urgent, yet hugely contested. Choices are stark: financing mitigation and adaptation, or stomaching immense suffering.
The past 75 years of human history
How will future generations look back on the past seventy-five years of human history? Will they find that the diplomatic instruments—international organizations, conventions, and conferences—were necessary, yet insufficient? Will they find that there were substantial steps in the direction of sustainability and slowing the climate catastrophe, but that the scale of the problem was discounted?
Will they understand that this occurred not for lack of information, deficient data, or absent debate, but because of the political power of those invested in the status quo; that is, the oil-producing states and companies—“Big Oil,” in short—comprising banks, airlines, car manufacturers, utilities, and, finally, consumers?
Paris Agreement
The historic Paris Agreement was concluded in 2015. However, since then, $ 7 trillion flowed into fossil fuel companies. Last year alone $ 700 billion, half of which went to companies that are expanding the extraction of fossil fuels.
The financial interests in the fossil fuel economy are evident, but so is the fact that global heating is primarily a problem of physics and only secondarily one of economics as well as politics—and that physics is indifferent regarding political considerations or complications.
The natural science understanding of the climate crisis, of the biodiversity crisis, of the plastics crisis, of the pollution crisis, is detailed and granular. Professionally it is uncontested, politically it is challenged.
These crises change everything, cataclysmically fast on a geological scale and far too slow on a human perception or a political action scale.
Future historians will construe the tenacity to delay, indeed obstruct, moves away from fossil fuels as the greatest political failure of the early twenty-first century. Given the many other global challenges of the time, this might sound implausible. However, the unprecedented global policy responsibility is not properly understood—or taken seriously.
Things started auspiciously enough. The First World Climate Conference, held in 1979, called on governments “to foresee and prevent potential man-made changes in climate that might be averse to the well-being of humanity.” After the ozone hole scare, the Montreal Protocol was concluded in 1987. Kofi Annan called it “perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date.”
Great leaps forward
In climate politics, June 1988 witnessed great leaps forward. After their summit in Moscow, the joint statement of US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet president Mikhail S. Gorbachev pledged to expand “cooperation with respect to global climate and environmental change, including … environmental protection, such as protection and conservation of stratospheric ozone and a possible global warming trend.”
A few weeks later, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) scientist James Hansen testified before the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that the greenhouse effect was measurable, causing extreme weather events.
The International Conference of the Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security, chaired by the Canadian UN ambassador Stephen Lewis, held in Toronto, resolved to reduce emissions. Its strongly worded statement identified human pressures on nature as “an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment, whose ultimate consequences would be second only to those of a global nuclear war.”
In December 1988, the UN General Assembly, in its second resolution on climate change, welcomed the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and noted with concern “that continued growth in atmospheric concentrations of ‘greenhouse’ gases could produce global warming with an eventual rise in sea levels, the effects of which could be disastrous for mankind if timely steps are not taken at all levels.”
The June 1992 Rio Earth Summit was unprecedented in size, scope, and spirit. The world’s governments assumed a “common but differentiated resposibility” for the management—conservation, protection, and restoration of the integrity—of the earth’s ecosystems and reached numerous agreements; namely, the Agenda 21, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Statement of Forest Principles, and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.
Rio coincided with the implosion of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. It took place in an atmosphere of buoyancy and optimism, despite some dark clouds: the wars in Yugoslavia, Somalia, and elsewhere were about to explode and Russia was to descend into chaos.
Still, Rio was the UN at its best: employing its convening power and establishing norms, getting countries to show their colors and publicly commit to globally responsible action. Positive developments resulted. But the climate crisis has accelerated while economic growth has continued unabated.
Relentless growth after Rio Summit
Regarding the latter, especially in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, growth has been relentless. This is also the case in China and India, where primary energy consumption shot up. Inequality has surged everywhere.
Globally since 1992, gross domestic product (GDP) has quadrupled from $ 25.5 trillion (or from $ 4,700 on average for each of the then living 5.5 billion people) to $ 101 trillion (over $ 12,000 for each of 8 billion people, albeit exceedingly unevenly distributed).
Further, direct primary energy consumption has grown by nearly two-thirds from 100 TWh to 159 TWh, while the share of fossil fuels—oil, gas, coal—increased from 84 to 86 percent. Over this period, too: the number of motor vehicles has more than tripled (from 500 million to 1.6 billion); the number of airline passengers has nearly quadrupled (from 1.2 billion to about 4.5 billion); international tourist arrivals have nearly quintupled (from 500 million to 2.4 billion); plastic production has more than tripled (from 132 million tons to over 400 million tons); while annual carbon dioxide emissions have not been reduced but, to the contrary, have gone up by more than 50 percent (from 23 GtCO2 to 37 GtCO2.).
Since Rio, the understanding of the climate crisis has become much more granular. A consensus has emerged among scientists from around the world in geology, geophysics, geochemistry, paleontology, oceanography, atmospheric physics, meteorology, glaciology, and many other fields, including economics, political science, international relations, and philosophy.
IPCC
The IPCC has developed a mechanism that no other issue commands, deploying hundreds of researchers to appraise tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers through a structured process, and basing their conclusions on a systematic, consensual word-by-word scrutiny.
There is no disagreement among scientists about the implications of the various heating paths, or about the measures, costs and the urgency of avoiding them. The Anthropocene’s trajectory, thus, is not a matter of uncertainty, but of predictability. And of great concern.
Climate litigation has been picking up pace in many countries and jurisdictions. Fantastic technological progress has made renewable energy not only competitive, but the cheapest source of energy anywhere on the globe.
In 2000, one megawatt hour of wind power cost about $ 600, today it is $ 30. Similarly for solar. The CO2 emissions19 of the European Union (EU) have fallen by 6 percent since the December 2015 Paris Agreement—a roaring success. That agreement established the imperative to hold the increase in average global temperature below 2°C or even 1.5°C above preindustrial levels and instituted a pledge and review approach that shifts to individual countries the responsibility to make appropriate, Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which are expected to be oriented toward the highest possible ambition.
All countries of the world, except Iran, Libya, and Yemen, have ratified the Paris Agreement but, while the EU’s CO2 emissions have fallen, globally they have risen by more than 7 percent.
No country on track to meet Paris commitments
Mapping and making the journey is not the same thing. Paris defined a tolerable ceiling, not, as is sometimes construed, an aspirational target. Regardless, no country is on track to meet its Paris commitments. Governments have pledged something they are unable or unwilling to honor.
What they have submitted to curb fossil-fuel emissions and deforestation between now and 2030 puts the world on a trajectory to heat between 2.5°C and 3°C this century. A survey of 380 IPCC scientists found that almost half anticipate 3°C warming.
Under the circumstances, it is little comfort that climate denialism, except in some dark right-wing corners, has all but disappeared. It has been replaced by climate delayalism, which means rhetorically accepting the problem while proposing greenwashing solutions that do not add up—a form of, “yes, but …” reasoning, in which the “but” always outweighs the “yes.”
The gap between ambition and action is disquieting because the failure to act does not park the problem. It allows it to grow. Today’s deficient mitigation measures will make it even more difficult in future to enact the deeper emission cuts needed to keep global warming at 2.5°C, or 3°C, or 4°C, or even 5°C. Temperatures will keep rising until the share of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is stabilized.
At the time of the Rio Earth Summit, three decades ago, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was still at the safe level of 350 ppm. By mid-2024, it had reached 427 ppm. Since Rio, more carbon dioxide has been emitted than in all prior history. The share of fossil fuels—coal, oil, and gas—stubbornly remains at well above 80 percent of global primary energy consumption.
The IPCC and the International Energy Agency insist that keeping the Paris Agreement’s temperature ceiling alive, the usage fossil fuels must contract sharply, and no new fossil sources can come on stream.
Yet “governments plan to produce, in 2030, around 110 % more fossil fuels than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C (i.e. more than double), and 69 % more than would be consistent with limiting warming to 2°C.”
The fossil fuel capacity being planned and constructed around the world is well over 1,300 GW (coal ≈ 500 GW, gas ≈ 850 GW). To put these numbers in perspective: the EU installed 200 GW wind power in 2022; the United States140 GW. Germany plans to add 19 GW renewable capacity in 2024 (wind ≈ 6 GW, solar ≈ 13 GW). The country’s daily electricity production is around 1,000 GW/h.
Given humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels, the Paris Agreement goal to prevent temperature rises beyond 1.5°C has become ever more fanciful because emissions would have to fall by 45 percent in little more than fifty months, which is well-nigh impossible. As has been predicted for a long time now, the crisis is worsening.
Deadlier heat waves
And that condemns the world to deadlier heat waves, more destructive floods, more frequent wildfires, more cataclysmic weather, more conflict, and more forced migration.
The past years have been the warmest since records began in the mid-1800s. CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide levels all reached new record highs. Antarctic sea ice also set a record for its lowest extent. The year 2023 was the warmest on record for ocean heat content. March and April 2024 were the warmest Marchs and Aprils ever recorded. And so on.
Going forward, 2024 will be cooler than 2025 and all future years. The goals of international climate negotiations are slipping out of reach. These, for the past decades, centered on two related, but distinct, aspects of the crisis: first on the physical imperative to decarbonize as well as to adapt; and second, on the political imperative to do so justly.
Climate Justice
Climate justice is about the causes of the prevailing addiction to fossil fuels, its beneficiaries, victims, costs, and, importantly, those who actually pay those costs. It highlights historical responsibility, contemporary distributional equity, and the liabilities imposed on those without voice or vote: future generations, people in the Global South, and other species. The three dimensions of climate justice are national, international, and intergenerational.
Today’s cheap energy externalizes the real costs of Northern extravagance and, in the quest to improve their economies and living conditions, the North baits the South down the same fossil fuel intensive path.
After World War II, the privileged inhabitants of the Global North, unwittingly transferred the costs and collateral damage of a profligate lifestyle into the future, the oceans, the soil, the atmosphere, and the Global South.
In the language of economics, they externalized the costs. Since carbon dioxide does not evaporate but, rather, stays in the atmosphere for centuries it is, again in the language of economics, both a stock issue and a flow issue.
To mitigate the climate crisis fairly, therefore, not only current emissions matter but also historical ones: the West grew rich since the Industrial Revolution by burning massive amounts of fossil fuels, the carbon dioxide emissions of which still contribute to warming today.
Developing countries—so the terminology in the Framework Convention—insist on their right to economic growth based on cheap fossil fuels.
From an equity point of view, they are justified. From 1850 to 2002 (i.e., before the takeoff of China, India, and South Korea), the United States added to the atmosphere about 30 percent, the EU 27 percent, China and Russia 8 percent each, Japan 4 percent, and India 2 percent, which means developed countries as a group added about 76 percent and developing countries 24 percent.
Table 1: Average carbon dioxide emissions per citizen, 2022
Global 5 tons
United States 15 tons
Canada 14 tons
Russia 11 tons
European Union 9 tons
Japan 9 tons
China 8 tons
India 2 tons
Ghana 0.6 tons
Source: Global Carbon Atlas N.D.
Given this historical lopsidedness, the future of human civilization hinges on balancing the addiction of the rich with the legitimate aspirations of the poor, while preserving a livable environment, and doing so this decade.
In the past, the demarcations were between countries. No longer. The rich in Beijing, Berlin, or Bogota; Lagos, London, or Los Angeles; New Delhi or New York; Rio, Tokyo, or Vienna are enjoying comparable lifestyles: big, air-conditioned houses, cars, air travel, food from all corners of the globe, kids studying at first- rate schools abroad.
Inequality within countries has deepened, so has inequality between countries.
As Table 1 demonstrates, the bottom 50 percent of the world’s citizens emit on average 1.4 tons of carbon dioxide while the top 10 percent emit 29 tons and the top 1 percent emit 101 tons. This means that the bottom 50 percent emit less than the top 1 percent.
Among other facts contained in this data, China’s emissions today are the same as Germany’s were in 1885, 139 years ago! The bottom 50 percent need to get more; the top 10 percent need to take less.
The rich are hooked on their lifestyle and, because it is an addiction, are unprepared to change it. The poor, understandably and rightfully, want to emulate the rich.
However, if both paths are pursued, the climate will collapse. The IPCC calculates that limiting warming to 1.5°C requires CO2 emissions globally to be cut in half by 2030 and to reach net zero around 2050.
This is a daunting task at every level—technical, financial, organizational— but, especially, political. The political intractability results from the requirements of development and equity with regard to the countries of the Global South on the one hand and, on the other, the potency of addiction to—at least—the existing standard of living in the North. Aspirational right collides with acquired right. This is a point of negotiation within and between countries.
UNFCCC’s COPs
The UNFCCC’s annual Conferences of the Parties are the forum for these negotiations. COP1 took place in Berlin in 1995 and was presided over by the then German environment minister Angela Merkel. The November 2024 conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, will be the twenty-ninth and is expected to finally chart an exit strategy from fossil fuels. Don’t hold your breath!
Still, COPs are the institutional framework in which major breakthroughs were achieved. They contributed to clarifying, propagating, publicizing, and even popularizing the wicked problem of global heating. COPs have not, however, been able to halt or slow global heating, let alone reverse it. This, to be sure, is not the fault of the instrument, but of those who play it.
To illustrate: the World’s Oil Companies’ 2022 profits exceeded $ 200 billion, while pledges for the Loss and Damage Fund at COP28 in Dubai remained below $ 1 billion. No country committed a sum approaching the annual in- comes of the footballers Ronaldo (Christiano Ronaldo), Messi (Lionel Messi), and Neymar (Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior).
Loss and Damage Funding in Proportion
Countries’ miserliness is astounding, but a sign that policy action has moved from the international arena to national implementation. Many governments, businesses, and people still do not seem to understand that we are in an emergency situation and need to cut emissions much faster this decade, or else any hope of staying at 1.5 degrees will be lost.
Another worrisome danger is magical thinking; namely, the belief that emissions can be lowered with no hard choices, that a carbon-free future can be had without real costs for businesses and citizens (i.e., without some difficult trade-offs).
The longer decisive mitigation and adaptation measures are delayed, the more suffering will result, and the higher the inevitable costs will be. Decisions not made today mean that future ones will have to be made under time pressure and in crisis conditions, involving internal turmoil and external armed conflict.
Table 2 Underfunding of Loss and Damage Fund
US$ Millions
Annual income of elite footballers (2023)
| Ronaldo | 260 |
| Messi | 135 |
| Neymar | 112 |
| National contributions to Loss and Damage Fund | |
| France | 109 |
| Italy | 109 |
| Germany | 100 |
| United Kingdom | 51 |
| European Union | 27 |
| Ireland | 27 |
| Denmark | 26 |
| United States | 17 |
| Canada | 12 |
| Japan | 10 |
Sources: Birnbaum 2024; Thwaites 2024
Battlefield has shifted to national politics
International negotiations will continue, but the battlefield has shifted to national politics, where the speed and scope of a renewable energy revolution will be decided. Although the benefits—financial, environmental, health—should be irresistible, opposition to climate policies is growing because the public support in principle for them quickly fragments in light of short-term costs and because governments have never candidly communicated the nature and magnitude of the climate crisis.
Neither, given the inevitable consequences of inaction, have they advocated investments in climate mitigation as a kind of insurance. The decades-long casual procrastination—it has been called predatory delay—will strike future generations, even future governments, as reckless.
Too late for homeopathic fine-tuning adjustments
Now it is too late for homeopathic fine-tuning adjustments. Mitigating global heating, as did the COVID-19 pandemic, requires warlike measures and fundamental changes.
As much as it is coming into focus that the climate crisis is in fact a fossil fuel crisis, the old mantra is fading that mitigating global heating can be achieved without cost, inconvenience, or change. Or that a technical deus ex machina, say carbon capture or solar radiation management, will allow the extractive business to continue a while longer. Whatever Big Oil’s rearguard actions, the fossil era is over.
It is unclear whether, before the climate tips, the politically possible proves to be ecologically sufficient, or if the ecologically necessary will miraculously become politically possible and if governments will actually follow through on their commitments. Historical experience is not reassuring.
Multilateral instruments were successful in: identifying the climate problem; choreographing a normative framework to address it; establishing a global network of scientists comprehensively and unimpeachably to take stock of what is known about the problem and to map a range of solutions; and publishing authoritative data on emissions, temperature rises, impacts, reduction announcements, investment decisions, and more.
This is no mean feat. With all the compromises, half-measures and insufficiencies, the COP process has notarized the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era. But the UN cannot coerce countries to do what science recommends and what the future of human civilization demands.
The required transformation is an issue of scale because eliminating fossil fuels represents a wholesale makeover of the modern global economic system, and that is not an environmental issue but a massive global political challenge. To keep the 1.5°C target alive, as the COP mantra has it, this rapid and far-reaching system’s transition must take place this very decade.
Time is of the essence because, as Bill McKibben reminds us, winning slowly is the same as losing. Going forward, governments will have to choose—actively or by default—between three options, or, more precisely, between a mix of three options.
The first is mitigation; that is, by reducing the damage (avoiding the unmanageable, as Nicholas Stern put it). The second is adaptation; that is, learning to live with the damage (managing the unavoidable). The third is suffering.
The important—and still wide open—question is the mix of the three. Future historians will tell. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Original title: Multilateral Climate Governance: Its Promise and Limits in Global Governance August 2024
Email: franz.baumann@georgetown.edu
Image: From global warming to global boiling. Source: EaaS