on clean energy in 2013 was $207 billion.
By 2014, Germany, the world’s fourth-largest economy, was getting a third of its energy from renewable sources and had reduced carbon emissions 23 percent from 1990 levels, creating 370,000 jobs.
The 2015 Paris Agreement
FROM THE END of November to December 12, 2015, government ministers, negotiators, climate experts, and world leaders convened in Paris, France, to consider the implications of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report and to agree on how to deal with its findings. It may well have been the world’s last chance for a meaningful agreement to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy before ongoing damage to the world’s climate becomes irreversible and devastating.
The nations that met in Paris are responsible for more than 95 percent of global emissions. Although it’s far from perfect, the agreement they came up with marks a significant achievement. When nations last attempted a global climate pact—in 2009, at COP15 in Copenhagen, Denmark—negotiations broke down and the resulting declaration was considered a failure. The Paris Agreement, in process and outcome, was a dramatic improvement—a product of the growing urgency to act on the defining issue of our time. It’s the first universal accord to spell out ways to confront climate change, requiring industrialized nations to transition from fossil fuels to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050 and developing nations by about 2080.
Before meeting in Paris, governments drafted plans to reduce national carbon emissions beginning in 2020. One goal of the negotiations was to develop a review mechanism to encourage countries to improve targets over time. That was achieved, giving hope that reductions will keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. In fact, the newly revised limit of 1.5 degrees is acknowledged as a target for future goal setting. Although the commitments aren’t enough to achieve either goal, improving targets every five years—as is called for in the pact—will get us closer. Past experience shows that once a commitment is made to address a crisis, many unexpected opportunities and solutions arise.
Still, getting the world back on track will not be an easy task, especially as it requires action on commitments from nations that haven’t always lived up to their word. The world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, China, was criticized throughout the conference for trying to water down requirements for a common emissions-and-targets reporting system and opposing the requirement for countries to update emissions-reduction goals every five years, advocating instead for voluntary updates.
Compromises produced a final product that fell short of assigning liability for past emissions and providing dependable “loss and damage” payments to nations already suffering from the effects of climate change. And success can’t be achieved without ongoing pressure to ensure targets are met and become more ambitious over time. Despite these shortcomings, the Paris Agreement was a leap forward in the fight against climate change. Funding for vulnerable and developing nations, plans to ratchet up ambition at regular intervals, and recognition of the role of indigenous knowledge will play major roles in future action.
The commitment should also inspire people at all levels of society to propose ways to speed up the shift to clean, renewable energy and reduce waste through greater energy efficiency. Although governments and industry must do a lot of the heavy lifting, it’s up to all of us to ensure that the planet we want—with clean air, safe water, fertile soil, and a stable climate—stays within reach, for our sake and the sake of our descendants.
Of course, climate science goes beyond determining that the world is rapidly warming to catastrophic levels and that human activity is a major contributor. Scientific research and analysis are also examining the current and potential consequences of global warming, the impacts on various natural systems and human endeavors, the feedback loops that are created from those impacts, and the potential solutions, among other elements of this complex and disturbing phenomenon.
In the next chapter, we’ll look at some of those impacts and what they mean for our world.
Chapter 2
CONSEQUENCES AND IMPACTS
MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF scientific evidence, developed over many years by scientists around the world, confirm that human activity is contributing to unusually rapid global warming and that failing to address its causes could be catastrophic for humanity, as well as numerous other species that share this small blue planet. Many indigenous peoples have long known that everything in nature is interconnected, that what we do to one part of a natural system often has unforeseen consequences that cascade throughout the environment. Our survival depends on a complex interaction of air, water, land, and living things, all interconnected and interdependent. Yet we have been recklessly treating the planet and its atmosphere as little more than a source of raw materials and a dumping ground for our waste and emissions.
Part of the problem is that Western thought and science often view things in isolation. Because nature doesn’t always behave the same in a lab, test tube, or computer program as it does in the real world, scientists and engineers have come up with many ideas that didn’t turn out as expected.
The insecticide DDT was considered a panacea for a range of insect pest issues, from controlling disease to helping farmers. But we didn’t understand bioaccumulation and biomagnification then—toxins concentrating up the food chain, risking the health and survival of animals from birds to humans. Chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, seemed so terrific we put them in everything from aerosol cans to refrigerators. Then we learned they damage the ozone layer, which protects us from harmful solar radiation.
The problems caused by DDT and CFCs were relatively easy to resolve, but we’re now facing the most serious and complex unintended consequence ever: climate change, from destroying carbon sinks such as forests and wetlands, and from industrial agricultural practices—but mainly from burning fossil fuels.
Oil, gas, and coal are miraculous substances—energy absorbed from the sun by plants and animals hundreds of millions of years ago, retained after they died, and concentrated as the decaying life became buried deeper in the earth. Burning them to harness and release this energy opened up possibilities unimaginable to our ancestors. We could create machines and technologies to reduce toil, heat and light homes, build modern cities for growing populations, and provide accessible transport for greater mobility and freedom. And because the stuff seemed so plentiful and easy to obtain, we could build roads and vehicles—big cars that used lots of gas—so that enormous profits would fuel prosperous consumer-driven societies.
We knew fairly early that pollution affected human health, but that didn’t seem insurmountable. We just needed to improve fuel efficiency and create better pollution-control standards. That reduced rather than eliminated the problem and only partly addressed an issue that appears to have caught us off guard: the limited availability of these fuels. But the trade-offs seemed worthwhile.
Then, for the past few decades, a catastrophic consequence of our profligate use of fossil fuels loomed. Burning them has released excessive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, creating a thick heat-trapping blanket. Along with our destruction of natural carbon-storing environments, this has steadily increased global average temperatures, causing climate change.
We’re now faced with ever-increasing extreme weather-related events and phenomena, such as ocean acidification, which affects myriad marine life, from shellfish to corals to plankton. The latter produce oxygen and are at the very foundation of the food chain. The cascading consequences of extracting and burning fossil fuels, as well as destroying carbon sinks, are affecting all facets of the planet—human
