The U.N.’s Verdict on Climate Progress Over the Past Year: There Was None. An annual assessment by the world body tracks the gulf between what countries have vowed to do and what they’ve actually achieved. (Gift Article)

3 comments

1. The climate emergency is an emergency for everyone. And yet the people with the most power to re-direct our economic future all act as if they can, at best, only point to our free-fall into climate chaos. They each convince themselves that it’s someone else’s job to (1) put us on the right track; and (2) power the effort to decarbonize at a scale sufficient to keep within a survivable global carbon budget.

   Right now it’s a con game. All the “net zero” promises assume a policy environment that makes compliance with commitments credible, because they are both beneficial and required. But the structure necessary to direct capital has been delayed into extinction.

   If the major managers of our money were honest, they would sound the alarm and use their vast lobbying power to overcome the blockade to effective climate legislation and regulation that’s been in place for a generation, funded by the fossil fuel industry. They would buy politicians the way the fossils have.

   Failing that unlikely awakening, it’s up to us to bring down this confidence game. The climate can’t wait. It is applying more pressure every day. We win this fight when that reality breaks through all the denial.

2. To put this article in a little context, remember that the promises are mostly traceable to the Paris agreement, which was almost 10 years ago. Since then, a steady stream of climate science reporting tells us that the climate system is much more vulnerable than we thought. Example after example reports changes happening faster bigger sooner than we thought. And new reporting tells us about feedback mechanisms that have not yet been adequately incorporated into the models.

   In other words,

   Nations are not acting on promises that were woefully inadequate in the first place.

3. Is there any consequence for countries not doing what they vowed to do? Besides the planet becoming uninhabitable?

Comments are closed.