Arguments
Few countries on track to meet Paris climate goals
Posted on 4 January 2020 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections
To meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, countries need to cut carbon pollution – fast.
But Bill Hare of the research think tank Climate Analytics says most countries are not on track. Climate Analytics partners on a project called the Climate Action Tracker. It analyzes the impact of climate policies in 32 countries that produce about 80% of global emissions.
Hare says some have adopted policies that could significantly reduce carbon pollution.
“If you take India as an example,” he says, “there’s a lot going on in renewable energy and electric vehicles, for example, that wasn’t really happening five or more years ago.”
But he says most countries’ efforts are insufficient. Climate Action Tracker estimates that based on countries’ current policies, temperatures will likely rise by more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That could cause catastrophic sea-level rise and devastating weather extremes.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, meeting the Paris goals is still feasible. But Hare says it won’t happen unless countries implement far more ambitious policies on climate.
“The urgency on the policy side is getting more and more acute,” he says.
Nations failing to meet their Paris Promises have kicked the current generations of those nations in the can. The next steps of Paris are the ratcheting up of actions to meet the required limits.
The science of how bad the future will be due to climate change impacts has a history of firming up a more frightening future. More science is making it harder for politicians to claim there isn't enough certainty in the science. That lack of certainty was the basis for the less negative story they wanted told all those years ago, along with claiming that the future generations would be richer and brilliantly able to solve everything.
And the collective lack of corrective action by the correction resistant political types in all aspects of society (even in science), including the lack of interest in expanding the awareness and understanding of the general population, makes things even worse. The larger accumulated climate impacts make it even easier for the correction resistant to claim The Other Side is Fear-Mongering and the the actions The Other Side claim are needed are Just Too Hard (and it gets harder for each future generation when less corrective action gets taken by current 'supposed leadership').