" ... It seems governments are not meeting their Paris targets and aren’t going to.
Indeed, in what they call “grim reading”, they say “global emissions are set to fall by less than 1% between 2010 and 2030.
The IPCC says 45% cuts are needed to hold temperature rise to 1.5C this century.”
Twenty years ago it was easy to talk about progress later.
But now that later has arrived along with the ever-shriller warnings about what was going to happen and when, it’s time to put up or shut up.
Preferably the latter.
... (the) mechanism of the Paris Agreement ... was mere good intentions without any actual machinery of enforcement.
And now they are all surprised because they spent years promoting the good intentions behind the treaty rather than asking honest questions about whether participants were willing to incur the costs of complying with it.
... There are people out there who believe meaningful action has been taken.
A great many people actually think the Canadian government cut our GHG emissions significantly, and it affected global temperature and weather, or that all nations did.
(It’s rarely clear which but it matters because of course Canada’s emissions and therefore any unilateral Canadian cuts are too small to matter.)
They don’t know that all this hype wasn’t backed by action.
Informed alarmists do, and they’re not happy.
Because despite a whole lot of talk of a climate “hoax”, they really believe what they say and they think we’re accelerating toward disaster and we need to stop.
... what do they want to do now?
... what if nothing is done and the world doesn’t boil over?
Will they admit they panicked over nothing significant?
... Recent net zero converts China, South Korea and Japan have yet to level up their short-term action.
Many vulnerable countries are too mired in debt to invest in greenery.”
... A great many governments only pretend to care, and that unconvincingly.
Or as a headline writer put it irritably in Politico, “UN Security Council hears of climate threat, does nothing”.
The writer of that article, Karl Matheson, explained irritably that “When it comes to climate change, bombs don’t work, so the United Nations Security Council prefers words to action.
Tuesday saw the highest profile discussion of climate change in the U.N.’s central body for promoting global peace.
But Russia, which holds a veto as a permanent member of the Council, warned against any move to recognize warming as a threat to global security.
Moscow’s stance left the Security Council’s U.K. presidency stabbing at a broken panic button.”
... John Kerry went and hyperventilated to the Security Council that not addressing the climate crisis is “marching forward to what is almost tantamount to a mutual suicide pact”.
But while Al Jazeera went on to editorialize in that news story that “Experts believe the world must reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 or sooner to ensure long-term warming is held to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (34.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and avoid triggering catastrophic climate tipping points”, a Big Three of China, India and Russia yawned ...
So what is to be done in this hopeless situation?
... If the climate crisis is real, the world ... needs decisive worldwide action starting at once and continuing relentlessly over the next decade.
... this sonorous-sounding talk is just verbal wheel-spinning, because this “heavy lifting… to strengthen national climate plans” isn’t about acting.
It’s about summoning the political “will” to make more promises that will go the way of all their predecessors.
... because they’ve oversold the crisis and kept trimming the fuse, the alarmists are on the horns of a dilemma.
If they don’t do anything really major, on a physical plane, right away, it will convince people they either don’t mean what they say or don’t understand it.
And if they do something drastic, well, major costs will hammer governments and citizens “mired in debt” and unemployment without producing any visible benefits because it will supposedly prevent a disaster that is meant to strike decades from now ...
Neither will stand the toughest test, that of observation.
To give credit where due, two writers in The Guardian keen that “The Paris agreement is failing”.
... As Eric Worrall asks, “Does The Guardian want military invasions of countries which fail to reduce CO2 emissions?
Author Jojo Metha laments the Paris Agreement has no enforcement clause – but she shies away from describing exactly how future agreements could be enforced, and what the world would do to replace the lost energy production.”
... There will be lofty rhetoric but no enforcement and no meaningful follow-through.
But what else have they got ... ?
... What is clear is the credibility of the whole UN climate process is at stake.
After 30 years of talking, there has to be more to show for it than this.”