The Atlantic: President Trump’s Fault Other Countries are Missing Their Paris Agreement Goals

There’s an fundamental misunderstanding regarding this excerpt which conflates the 2°C target with the Paris Agreement NDCs:

“But no major developed country is on track to meet its Paris climate goals, according to the Climate Action Tracker, an independent analysis produced by three European research organizations. Even Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom—where right-wing governments have made combatting climate change a national priority—seem likely to miss their goals.”

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Germany, Japan and the UK along with many other countries are on track to reach their Paris Agreement commitments as laid out in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC’s). The NDC’s were submitted to the UNFCCC at the UN in New York on 22nd April 2016. These are the agreed emission cut promises actually agreed to at Paris in December 2015 and officially submitted four months later.

The NDC’s are strictly timed to run from 2020 to 2030. This time frame was agreed to at Paris as well. In other words, the purview of the Paris Agreement in terms of promising concrete commitments on emission reductions (the NDC’s) lasts until 2030. Many, probably most countries will fulfil those promises on time or before time.

The confusion arises when organisations such as Climate Action Tracker refer to the Paris Agreement’s 2°C commitment (or 1.5°C hoped-for target). These come in a vaguely worded paragraph in the Paris Agreement that’s separate from the paragraphs that specifically relate to how the NDC’s are to be formulated and presented.

The 2°C was a long-term target. To be specific, it was long term in the sense that everyone knew the Paris NDC’s wouldn’t be enough and so at future COP meetings they would have to thrash out more ambitious emission cuts in a “ratcheting up” of commitments (their preferred term).

Those new commitments would be new NDC’s superseding the old 2015 Paris ones. They wouldn’t be part of the Paris Agreement but part of a new future agreement made somewhere else, at another COP meeting and within the UNFCCC framework. They would only apply to Paris (as an add-on) if they were agreed as being implemented before 2030 i.e. during the Paris Agreement time frame of 2020 to 2030.

A framework for these NDC revision negotiations was agreed at Paris: every five years starting in 2023 (but with a preliminary reassessment at COP26 in Poland this year).

So we’re still at this early stage where the Paris NDC’s are known not to satisfy the 2°C target and the idea is that subsequent negotiations will (supposedly) bridge that gap with stronger NDC’s.

So the above shows why the Paris Agreement’s paragraph citing the commitment to 2°C was vague. It’s because everyone involved knew that their Paris-agreed NDC’s would go nowhere near achieving the 2°C target, let alone the 1.5°C. Everyone knew that the NDC promises alone would (according to models) limit the temperature to 3.6°C to 3.7°C.

This meant that when the delegates left Paris, no one had a clue as to how the world was going to reach the 2°C target. No one had promised anything more than the NDC’s which was equal to a collective 3.6°C promise. This is and always was totally clear in the minds of the delegates and the organisations such as CAT, Climate Interactive (CI), MIT and Shell, who supplied them with in-depth modelling scenarios. CAT etc would have us believe that it will be difficult but doable to reach 2°C by employing eye watering emission cuts that rely on CCS, high carbon taxes and high renewable subsidies.

So here’s a summary:

1- The Paris NDC’s were the only solid emission cut promises agreed to at Paris. Everyone involved knew at the time that these would limit warming to around a 3.6°C rise in 2100. These are largely on-track with policy commitments backing them up. They’re on-track because they’re reaping the low-hanging fruit (less painful policies).

2- To address the shortfall between the 2°C goal and the known 3.6°C achieved by the NDC’s, the “ratcheting up” system was agreed to with meetings every five years to thrash them out. These haven’t even started yet. But CAT, CI and MIT focus on the 2°C goal and say no country is fulfilling its Paris Agreement commitments. They say this while omitting to say that this is all in hand i.e. to be addressed in the five-yearly meetings. Yes, it’s highly unlikely that the “ratcheted” NDC’s will achieve the 2°C goal. Nevertheless, that is the Paris set-up and so it shouldn’t be misrepresented by these organisations.

3- Thus, we have two Paris Agreement commitments that are at odds with each other. The first is the solidly agreed NDC’s which were signed off at New York in 2016 and are largely backed up with policy commitments. The second is the vague 2°C/1.5°C collective global commitment that isn’t backed up by any emission cut promises, NDC’s or cogent ideas as to achieving it at all. It’s disingenuous to cite this second commitment in order to imply that targets agreed at Paris are being missed. Yes, CAT etc. can jump through semantic hoops by tacitly invoking the vague 2°C target when saying the Paris Agreement commitments aren’t being met but that is why it’s disingenuous because everyone thinks that they’re referring to the solid NDC’s. They therefore think that CAT are saying the Paris commitments are unravelling. They’re not.

And (in theory) they’re to be strengthened in due course in order to address the 2°C commitment.

….and the facts are the U.S. has been reducing its carbon emissions for more than a decade without government mandates while no other signatory is close to the US record. Citing the only country to come close to or meet the goals as the cause for the failure of the accord is a stupendous assumption that requires a denial of reality.