The dark side of COP21’s ‘success’

The Paris COP21 must have been the most-awaited international meeting in many decades and provided two weeks of high tension until on the morning of Saturday, 15th December, Laurent Fabius stood up, banged his green felt hammer and announced that the climate conference had ended with a general agreement. Even the usually inscrutable and taciturn UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon seemed overwhelmed with emotion. 

The COP21 agreement had an aspirational level, simply expressed by the “below 2°C and possibly less than 1.5°C” mantra. The figures refer to restrictions on the rise in Earth average temperatures since the start of the industrial era. No one mentioned that since that date we have already had a 1°C rise, which made the aspirations rather ambitious.

Behind that aspiration lay other elements of a varied nature. The first and perhaps the least understood is the science of climate change. Though still not exact, current climate science is in a good position to indicate the general lines of “climate-influencing” conduct that would be required to meet those aspirations. A fair “code of conduct” must discriminate between countries with different responsibilities for the present state of affairs. That will bring in not only economic and social arguments from the different country groups but also the supra-national group of energy corporations and their shadowy battalions of lobbyists who are not accountable to national parliaments, but only to shareholders. 

Formally, the COP21 agreement is meant to come into operation after 2020. There is one emphasis in the text that “enhanced pre-2020 ambitions can lay a solid foundation for enhanced post-2020 ambition”, but we have still to hear of any such “ambitions” being put in place just yet. 

The critical weakness of COP21 is that whatever bounds are set are not legally binding but represent “offers” that each state, or group of states in the case of the EU, decided to make on a voluntary basis. The chief responsibility for this watered-down agreement must be carried by the US: Secretary of State John Kerry made it clear that the US Senate would scuttle any legally-binding agreement.

Nor is this problem going to be solved at the signing jamboree in New York this coming April as Minister Leo Brincat (MaltaToday, 31st January) seems to think. There was no appraisal of offers at Paris and no future overall scrutiny and enforcement mechanism has been agreed on, so New York cannot add any “legal” punch to Paris. 

The present CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is 400 parts per million, to be compared with the concentration of 350ppm that current science regards as “safe”: it is unlikely to lead to catastrophic climate changes. From the observational side, the effects we are observing to date – Arctic and Antarctic ice melt, glacier retreat, prolonged droughts and galloping desertification – are related, we believe, to the 1°C rise in temperature that has taken place since the start of the industrial era, in the wake of a change from 280ppm CO2 to the present 400ppm. 

As the agreement itself openly admits, the promises as they stand are not deemed up to the stated aim of “a least-cost 2°C scenario” And this is precisely why COP21 has met with strong criticism. For there is no clear link shown to connect the promised cutbacks in Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) levels with changes in CO2 atmospheric concentrations. The diplomatic “cart” has been put before the “scientific” horse. The fact that the COP21 agreements are relatively short term – nothing beyond 2035 in the hand, plus promises of five-yearly reviews in the bush – does not help.

Some spontaneous reactions – beyond the euphoric ones – may be worth quoting. James Hansen, now retired from NASA but still among the foremost climate scientists, roundly labelled the agreement as “fraud”; his slim hope was that China, under the hammer of its appalling air pollution, would take over the leadership in the race towards clean energy. Other climate scientists, if less critical, all pointed out with various degrees of emphasis that the agreed INDC levels were unlikely to confine the temperature rise to anywhere near 2°C, despite the fact that an exact connection between CO2 concentration and temperature rise has not yet been established. 

Hansen and others were agreed that the promised rates of cut-back in CO2 emissions, and hence the elimination of fossil fuel use, were much too slow. In fact Hansen asserted that an agreement to tax carbon emissions (to the tune of $50/t) just between the US and China would have a greater effect than the whole of the Paris cuts. The notion and possible workings of a carbon tax have been taken up in detail by an IMF group, who concluded it could provide a sufficiently powerful mechanism for rapid CO2 cutbacks. And in the course of the discussion, the IMF group touched on a carbon source which had been left out completely in COP21: maritime and aviation carbon, now running at 2-3% of total carbon but expected to reach 22% in 2050. 

There were other more sober assessments, which in the end painted no rosier future for the “historic” Paris Agreement. A group of climatologists was on hand to assess what was actually required to reach the “temperature” targets. Hans Schnellhuber from Potsdam reckoned that to beat the 2°C limit, CO2 emissions would have to drop to zero by 2070, while to keep below 1.5°, the CO2 zero would have to come down to 2050. The US Climate Interactive Institute said that a limit of 1.8°C would require the US INDC to go from 26% to 45% below 2005 levels by 2030, with other major emitters to follow suit. Johann Rockstrom of Stockholm Resilience Centre set the hardest limit: a good chance of keeping to 1.5°C requires the richest nations to cut fossil fuel use by 2030. 

There has been at least one attempt at putting numbers on the promises of the Paris COP21. There are a number of difficulties because of the nature of the agreement. Climate scientists are generally interested in working out climate changes or, strictly speaking, average temperature rises to 2100; but the COP21 (voluntary) promises do not cut in until 2020 and none goes beyond 2035.

The first scenario consists simply in taking the INDC promises up to 2035 and keeping INDCs constant thereafter to 2100. The result is ‘discouraging’ to say the least, confirming the comments made above: a 3.5°C rise coming from a 670ppm CO2 level by 2100. Working with a series of cuts of steadily increasing severity, essentially directed at the biggest emitters, one finally arrives at the much wished for COP21 holy grail: a 1.8°C rise which requires all countries to have CO2 peaking by 2030 and then falling to very low values by 2100. 

That 1.8°C ceiling has a darker side to it, again coming from an intrinsic “fault” in the COP21: its understandable but near-fatal concern only with the burning of fossil fuels but NOT with their production. Yet the severe cuts in CO2 production required by the <2°C ceiling have an instant impact on the current production of fossil fuels; more accurately, and for the energy companies more brutally, that ceiling has the following clear implication: a good part – some say 2/5 others even 3/5 – of the present known reserves of fossil fuels must be left where they are: in the ground. A fortiori, the scramble to discover new deposits is pointless if we were really determined to avoid catastrophic climate change.

And it is here that the “sounding brass” of the COP21 aftermath may be seen at its worst. For many COP21 leaders returned home from Paris to put their signature to contracts for new exploration for fossil fuels. President Obama, fresh from blocking the Tar Sands Keystone XL pipeline, has signed contracts for extensive Arctic exploration; Prime Minister Cameron had hardly passed the white cliffs of Dover when he gave the nod to extensive fracking in England (Scotland has refused to play), plus a go-ahead for a new opencast coalmine in South Wales; the President of Estonia has just signed an order for fracking over the whole national territory. Even Norway has just published a plan to increase its fossil fuel output. 

Perhaps one should take on board – as a spur to action, not as a drug on the market – the succinct judgment on COP21 of George Monbiot, the Guardian’s writer on environmental matters: Compared to what it could have been it is a miracle; compared to what it should have been it is a disaster.