282: How big oil is holding back progress on the Paris Climate Agreement

Full Transcript

Tom: [00:00:02] Hello and welcome to Outrage and Optimism. I'm Tom Rivett-Carnac.

Christiana: [00:00:05] I'm Christiana Figueres.

Paul: [00:00:06] And I'm Paul Dickinson.

Tom: [00:00:07] Today, ten years after the adoption, we are going to unpack the Paris Agreement, understand what's in it and why some of the implementation has been so slow. Thanks for being here. Okay, friends. So we are still pretty near to the beginning of 2025. We have introduced how the year is going to be, and one of the things that we covered in that episode, back right at the beginning of the year, is that this is an important year for lots of reasons. It's the middle of the decisive decade. It is the year of the ratchet through the Nationally Determined Contributions. But it's also ten years since Paris. Many listeners will, of course, be familiar with the Paris Agreement. This is a big part of our own personal history, and a big part of the world's history in trying to deal with this issue, and we're going to delve into what is actually inside the Paris Agreement and some of the challenges it's faced through implementation. But just before we do, let's just listen back for a minute, take.

Paul: [00:00:57] Us back to take us.

Tom: [00:00:58] Back some of how the world sounded that day.

Reporter: [00:01:00] Final preparations are made, the finishing touches applied in a bizarre tradition of the world of diplomacy. This little corner of France becomes UN territory for the duration of the conference.

King Charles: [00:01:11] On an increasingly crowded planet. Humanity faces many threats, but none is greater than climate change.

Barack Obama: [00:01:20] Here in Paris, we can show the world what is possible when we come together, united and common effort and by a common purpose.

Reporter: [00:01:28] The world leaders have gone home, and it's time for the hardcore climate negotiators to get to work.

Christiana: [00:01:33] The president would like to close this tomorrow, so he is running a very tight ship here.

Reporter: [00:01:39] Well, it really is the last critical few hours. Again, last night negotiations went on into the early hours of the morning. That's the third night on the trot. But the French do think they have the basis of a document that will go on to form the final agreement. But again, at any point during that meeting, any country out of the 195 countries. Plus the EU could stand up and say, actually, hang on, I don't like that bit and the whole thing could tumble. We don't think that's going to happen. But with these climate meetings, you never know.

Reporter: [00:02:13] It's being hailed as an historic agreement and a turning point for the world. After two weeks of negotiations. Nearly 200 countries committed to a new deal that aims to slow global warming.

Tom: [00:02:26] Well, I mean, certainly brings it all back listening to that. I remember that final moment of adoption and pulling over in the front row. You're on the stage, Christiana, giving everyone so much applause and appreciation for the role that they played. And it was the end of a long all along.

Paul: [00:02:39] Thanking your team at the Secretariat. I remember you pointing.

Tom: [00:02:42] Do you guys did this which is in your as you always are, so generous. So pretty much everyone's heard of the Paris Agreement, but not many people actually know what it is. Why don't you give it to us in a nutshell.

Christiana: [00:02:51] First of all, not everybody has heard of the Paris Agreement.

Tom: [00:02:53] Actually, I think it is the most recognized term in climate change.

Christiana: [00:02:56] Aha! But we have many other people outside the bubble. Tom.

Tom: [00:03:01] I thought that was everybody.

Paul: [00:03:02] It's just a big old bubble.

Christiana: [00:03:04] Bubble that we live in.

Tom: [00:03:06] On the assumption that there is somebody listening who has not heard of the Paris Agreement. And if you are that person, we want to hear from you because you're a statistical anomaly, that you're here and you've never heard of the Paris Agreement and.

Christiana: [00:03:16] Definitely want to hear.

Tom: [00:03:17] From you. Yeah. Christiana is now going to give you a nutshell definition of what it is.

Christiana: [00:03:21] So the Paris Agreement is the legally binding agreement that was reached in December of 2015, adopted by all countries of the world with the purpose of limiting not solving climate change, but limiting the impacts of climate change to within a manageable range for both humans and other forms of life on this planet.

Tom: [00:03:42] I would say that's a bag of nuts rather than a nutshell. What do you.

Paul: [00:03:45] Think? And there will be a link to the Paris Agreement in the show notes.

Tom: [00:03:47] And Paul will be issuing questions.

Paul: [00:03:49] On whether I will. That'll be a quiz. Now, good news listeners, whilst we talk about the Paris Agreement, we happen to have two people very intimately involved in the creation of the agreement. If you're both able to talk about that. Can I ask you, Christiana, and also, Tom, what were your roles in that international agreement?

Christiana: [00:04:06] How do I put it in? In a nutshell, it is not a bag of nuts. I've been involved in climate negotiations since the 1990s, but in 2010 to 2016, I was the executive secretary of the UN Climate Change and hence responsible for delivering the Paris Agreement.

Paul: [00:04:23] Wow. Good job. Got it done. Fantastic. And then somewhere in your campus, there was a kind of side office where. Tom, you were doing something.

Tom: [00:04:33] Well, Christiana hired me a few years before Paris to come and be her senior advisor and look at the political strategy, the levers we could pull when diplomacy was unable to deliver the outcome we wanted. So I was basically a roving solver person to move around and try and solve big problems in the diplomatic process.

Paul: [00:04:50] And I'm going to claim just a small part in this, because you very kindly brought me in to try and get the non-state actors, the corporations, the investors, the cities to also publicly state their support for the agreement. And that was rather nice coming together. Bit of kind of coffee, cream and a small bun.

Tom: [00:05:08] So, I mean, we should kick off. And I think one of the things that we could really add value to listeners through this episode is just explaining what is in the Paris Agreement. Many people will have heard of it and they'll understand it's important. It was a landmark moment, but really what it can take is what the heck is it? Why was it so important we reached this agreement? But anything you both want to say at the front end of this episode before we dive in.

Paul: [00:05:27] Well, just that I'm gonna say what I've said before, the absolutely extraordinary experience which I rather fear I will never have again, of hearing every single country in the world enthusiastically endorse a global treaty. I mean, that is the most beautiful thing you can ever say. I'm going to stop before I choke up. That's me.

Tom: [00:05:48] But I mean, just to say I remember that because I remember because obviously, after the adoption, country by country, went around 196. And I started off very emotional. But I mean, if I'm honest by like country 20 or 30, I was beginning to be like, you know what, we could probably go to the pub now. But Paul was like, I am staying here until the last one is finished. You really it really.

Paul: [00:06:05] Almost didn't quite do that. But, you know, the Saudi Arabia and Russia and, you know, kind of Egypt and everywhere. Yeah. Big day for you, Christiana, if I might say so.

Christiana: [00:06:15] Big day. Our big, big six years, I would say. But yeah, just to to emphasize that, you know, it was adopted by unanimity, which is actually quite different than consensus. It means no single country at all against it, despite the fact that we had a whole bunch of little, oh, last minute dramas there, but adopted.

Tom: [00:06:36] They didn't feel like last minute dramas at the time.

Paul: [00:06:38] I seen a three minute delay, a three hour delay or something, right?

Christiana: [00:06:41] Or, well, several day delay. It was adopted by unanimity in December 2015 and then entered into force in November of 2016. So I think it is still the fastest ever major international agreement to come into force.

Tom: [00:06:55] And thank God, because I think the US administration knew they were coming up against an election. And thank goodness they pushed that through.

Christiana: [00:07:01] Goodness.

Paul: [00:07:01] Yeah, I think the last thing I would say is that this whole idea that we just couldn't progress until we had a global agreement, and then we did, and that was behind us, theoretically opens the door to progress.

Tom: [00:07:12] Theoretically that works.

Christiana: [00:07:16] Theoretically, it opens the door to problem because the purpose. Let's just remember what the purpose of these 25 pages, at least in English. The purpose is to not solve climate change, right? We will never solve climate change. That's already an admission. That is hard for me and I think for most people. But it is not to solve climate change. We're too late for that. It's about limiting the impacts of climate change to within a manageable range for humans and for other forms of life on the planet. That is basically the purpose. I would say it is a humble aspiration and yet one that is still elusive.

Tom: [00:07:56] It's still hard to do.

Christiana: [00:07:57] Yeah. Still elusive. So bottom line, what we should remember, and I'll go into a couple of the specifics of the agreement, but we should remember that the Paris Agreement represents the art of the possible. At that moment in time, on the basis of the available science at that time, which has progressed a lot, but at that time the best available science and in the economic and political context of that moment. So the only thing that the Paris Agreement does is actually it lays a basis for the decarbonisation of the global economy over several decades. But the specifics would come later and have come later over the past ten years. To summarise what has happened, basically over the past ten years, we have more and more certainty of the science, much more certainty. We certainly.

Tom: [00:08:52] And how serious the impacts. I mean, I remember in Paris, two degrees felt like that was the goal with best efforts to 1.5. Now we know two degrees is orders of magnitude worse than one.

Christiana: [00:09:02] That is one of the pieces of science that evolved. The other thing that has happened over the past ten years, including in addition to this certainty of science, is that we have many more extreme weather events, so much more proof and evidence of climate change, more frequent and more damaging. We adopted the agreement in a context of almost thinking that we would be in a world with constant damages, but without experiencing it, whereas now we really are experiencing it. And the other thing that has changed over the past ten years is geopolitics has made global progress on climate much more challenging than it was in 2015. Yeah for sure.

Tom: [00:09:45] Even while the technology makes it easier to do.

Christiana: [00:09:47] Even while the technology makes it easier. So I think to understand the Paris Agreement or bring it into a nutshell, I would.

Tom: [00:09:55] You're now going to explain what's really in the Paris Agreement. The people who want to know this is the moment to hear this from you.

Christiana: [00:10:00] I mean, somebody who wants to read the 25 pages and you're welcome to do so. It's only 25 pages.

Tom: [00:10:05] Is that a requirement to listen to this podcast?

Christiana: [00:10:07] Okay. No no no.

Paul: [00:10:08] It's NBC.

Tom: [00:10:09] Is like 2000.

Paul: [00:10:10] Pages. So I think you're getting off lightly.

Christiana: [00:10:12] Yeah. This is the cliff version.

Tom: [00:10:14] Okay. But is there any part of the agreement you recommend? Everyone does read the preamble or something like that or.

Christiana: [00:10:18] Yeah.

Tom: [00:10:19] Okay.

Christiana: [00:10:19] Yeah, yeah. The preamble because it puts the whole context of it. But I would actually divide the Paris Agreement into three basic chunks. One is what are the desired outcomes or goals of the Paris Agreement. The second is what are the ways that we have agreed to achieve those outcomes and goals. And the third is how are we going to assess our progress towards those goals. Okay. So that's a pretty logical flow, right. And and more or less the agreement is structured in that flow. So to the first part.

Tom: [00:10:57] The outcomes.

Christiana: [00:10:58] Outcomes or goals okay. It's interestingly expressed in two different ways. But it refers to the same thing okay. It is expressed as a temperature goal first. And the language that we had originally in many of the drafts was to limit global temperature increase to well below two degrees Celsius. That is the language that we worked with for years. And then in 2015, the small island states came in and said, that's not good enough. That is not going to guarantee our survival. And they really insisted that 1.5 degrees, which today is the temperature that we refer to, nobody refers to two degrees anymore. We all refer to 1.5 degrees, but it was not the original temperature goal.

Tom: [00:11:50] And if I can just give a shout out to the late, great Tony DeBrum.

Christiana: [00:11:53] Oh please.

Tom: [00:11:53] Do. Tony, the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, and really just somebody who spent decades at the heart of bringing countries together to drive progress on the climate agenda. This was, I think, one of the genuine highlights of my life. When we were living through the Paris negotiations, we knew that forces of darkness were gathering to slow us down. And he triggered this high ambition coalition, where rich and poor, vulnerable and powerful countries linked arms and walked through into the negotiation hall to thunderous applause and sort of dispersed all opposition to this new 1.5 goal. He really brought that out of the field of impossibility and into reality.

Christiana: [00:12:32] And doing so because of his lived experience, not because science had proved it. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. Okay. Because it took science three years to put out a report that said Tony DeBrum and all of the other Pacific islands were right. There was a huge difference in the quality of life on this planet between 1.5 and 2 degrees. We did not know that in 2015 he did that. His leadership came out of his lived experience not because he was buttressed by science.

Tom: [00:13:04] And it was such a difficult political. I mean, I remember we went to see him several months before Paris, and he explained what he was going to try and do. And I remember both of us were like, good luck to you. This is a big lift and we really hope you can get there. But he really did try.

Paul: [00:13:17] He really deplores, as I love a phrase like that, just somebody, you know.

Tom: [00:13:21] It really that was it. That was the moment for me when it was like, this is going to happen. Yeah.

Christiana: [00:13:25] Just to fast forward to where we are now. Right. The reason Copernicus report, the reason why it's getting all of this attention, it doesn't refer to two degrees at all. It refers to the fact that last year, 2024, was the first calendar year that has reached more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. So, you know, just confirm.

Tom: [00:13:44] Knocking on the.

Christiana: [00:13:44] Door that the temperature reference now is 1.5 and not.

Paul: [00:13:50] Two. And I've got to state something incredibly obvious. You know, people will say certain people who perhaps haven't spent as long in scientific papers as we all have will say, well, the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees is negligible. It's not specifically about the temperature difference. It's about the likelihood of extreme runaway feedback events, just weird things happening that we can't control or even deal with. And so it's a doorway to risk. It's not just like a tiny bit hotter.

Christiana: [00:14:18] And has been quantified 2 to 3 times as much, infrastructure destruction, 2 to 3 times as much habitat and fauna destruction, and 2 to 3 times as many human deaths.

Paul: [00:14:29] Think of it just as an average of extremes rather than a tiny temperature change.

Tom: [00:14:34] But we're on outcomes. We should keep going because we go out some distance to track temperature.

Christiana: [00:14:38] Temperature relief related, then the other way to understand the outcome or the goal is to say so what does that mean in terms of greenhouse gas emissions? So that's the other interpretation or the other reference point. And once again, the Paris Agreement is not very specific. Just like it wasn't specific about 1.5. It's not very specific. It only says aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible.

Tom: [00:15:05] And that ambiguity was strategic. But the fact that it has this like these are the outcomes and it defines it as science improves. That then relates back to.

Christiana: [00:15:12] The yeah, I mean, we call that creative ambiguity in language, right? That's un un term creative ambiguity allows for science to be more specific in the future, but also allows for political interpretation, generosity. So every country can go home and say, this is the way I interpret it, this is the way I interpret it. So it is very much used that creative ambiguity. Right? Sorry, but that's just the.

Tom: [00:15:37] First part of part.

Christiana: [00:15:38] One. That's the first part.

Christiana: [00:15:39] That's temperature and greenhouse gas emissions. Then the question is, so how are we going to do that? How are we going to limit the temperature and the greenhouse gas emissions. And there the Paris outcome goes into quite a few tools, if you will, to achieve those outcomes. The first obviously is mitigation. That means reduction of emissions. And in the Paris Agreement that is expressed as a famous NDCs, the Nationally Determined Contributions, which are the several rounds every five years all countries report into the UNF, CCS, they report in what they're going to be doing domestically to reduce their emissions. And every five years they have to increase those efforts. So it's a method of progression beyond the previous one. So we are now approaching February 2025, in which countries have to put in their third set of NDCs. Now, the reason why it's important to have that as a progression is because before the Paris Agreement, we were heading for a temperature increase of anywhere between 4 to 6 degrees, right by 2100. Right. That's the the deadline. And then today, with the NDCs that we have, we're in track for an heating of somewhere around 2.5 to 2.7 degrees. That's much better than 4.6.

Christiana: [00:17:07] Still.

Christiana: [00:17:08] Higher. Still not 1.5. So the NDC 3.0 that countries are having to put in by February should get us much closer or ideally should get us to hit the 1.5. But each of these series of indices is basically shaving off the worst of the of the temperature increases.

Paul: [00:17:30] Can I just say that I think what's so brilliant about the NDCs is they are nations speaking into the global Court of public opinion. So nations speaking to nations about what each other is doing, they are all sharing with each other their own plans. And that creates a sort of potentially quite a competition to will to good, to, to. Peer pressure, I think, is the phrase and a certain degree of competition and it's really good.

Tom: [00:17:54] Yes, I agree with that. And also we should just make sure people understand. I mean, every time we have had the previous two rounds of NDCs, as you say, the temperature trajectory has come back down towards the safe zone. But as you say, not enough, not enough. And this is a really important one, because if we don't do enough in this round in February, next month, or at some point this year in 2025, by the time the next round of NDCs come forward, the opportunity for damage mitigation will really have passed.

Christiana: [00:18:21] That is absolutely true because this round is valid for ten years.

Tom: [00:18:25] For ten.

Christiana: [00:18:25] Years.

Christiana: [00:18:25] The other two rounds were valid for five.

Paul: [00:18:28] And just to say I was applauding the process, there's no guarantee that the outcome is going to be right and you can't really force the countries to comply with their NDCs. But it's there and it's a line in the sand. It's a statement. It's it's good stuff in principle. It's a great mechanism.

Christiana: [00:18:41] Call the ratchet.

Paul: [00:18:42] Call the ratchet mechanism.

Tom: [00:18:43] All right. So that's mitigation.

Christiana: [00:18:45] That's mitigation. The other piece that absorbs or reduces emissions of course, is the natural carbon sequestration of biomass or nature on this planet. And that in the Paris Agreement is called sinks and reservoirs. It doesn't refer to your kitchen sink. It refers to the capacity of our plants and our flora to absorb carbon and put it into their biomass or into the soil. We're actually just getting off the ground with that. I would say we're doing really well with energy technology, but we're not doing really well with what we're doing on nature related activities right now. The task force, our nature related financial disclosures is helping a lot, as is the fact that today, finally distinct from 2015, I think there is growing agreement about the fact that biodiversity and climate change are two sides of the same.

Christiana: [00:19:45] Yeah.

Paul: [00:19:46] Pump up and pump down, I call it.

Christiana: [00:19:47] And that would not have been something that people would have likely agreed to ten years ago.

Tom: [00:19:54] Natural sinks and sequestration.

Christiana: [00:19:57] The other piece that is interesting is everything to do with markets. It's taken us ten years.

Tom: [00:20:02] By markets, you mean the ability to actually purchase emissions reductions, like a sort of carbon offset type market?

Christiana: [00:20:08] Yeah. Because, you know, no matter where a tonne of greenhouse gases is absorbed on this planet, it has the global effect. So it doesn't really matter where it happens. And there are cheaper emission reductions in some countries. So other countries would want to buy that. It's taken us ten years to approve the rules. Why? They were just approved in Cop 29.

Speaker12: [00:20:31] Why did it take ten years?

Christiana: [00:20:32] It took ten years. Because before the Paris Agreement, we had another market mechanism for oldies called the CDM Clean Development Mechanism. It was a global market, operated incredibly efficiently and had, let's say, false positives, which means there were definitely projects there that did not achieve the reductions that they claimed. So unfortunately, it got into this ideological fight. And when we moved from the Kyoto Protocol to the Paris Agreement being the new legally binding framework, we threw the baby out with the bathwater and we said, CDM in the trash, and now we're going to redo the market. I've always been a market enthusiast and not everybody is, but I've been very open about it. I would have preferred let's take the CDM, let's clean it up, let's improve it, let's make it more rigorous and continue. But what we have done is we've lost ten years for a regulated market. We've had voluntary market, right. But it doesn't have the force or the impact of a regulated market.

Tom: [00:21:38] That's an issue we should definitely get into this year, because it's going to be a big part of what's coming.

Paul: [00:21:42] Long story short, if you want to sink a market, you know, if you want to put like a torpedo hole below the waterline, just change your mind halfway through. After ten years, change all the rules, and everyone's kind of like, we're not doing.

Christiana: [00:21:52] That again or saying there are no rules.

Paul: [00:21:53] Or saying there are no rules. Yeah, long, loud and legal is a famous saying about what markets want.

Tom: [00:21:58] Okay, so we got markets sequestration mitigation.

Christiana: [00:22:01] Then adaptation of course a very important pillar of efforts and adaptation is basically the capacity of a country of a of a company, of a city, whoever, to adapt to the new conditions they are facing. And it is it is the bane of developing countries because they a they don't have that many emissions, so they can't reduce that many emissions, and they are paying the highest price of the impacts, and it has been increasingly difficult for developing countries to adapt to the new conditions. And we also have to understand that there is local adaptation, right. Specific areas or towns, or seaside or sea coastlines that can and have begun to adapt. But there is also global adaptation that is very, very difficult to deal with, to take, you know, just one number. If you can no longer adapt, you have to migrate.

Paul: [00:23:04] Yep. Yeah, it's already happening.

Christiana: [00:23:06] Right. And it's already happening. So the annual average of people migrating due to climate change, that means forcibly displaced each year by weather related events, went up to 21.5 million people between 2008 and 2016. 16, and then went up to 32.6 million in 2022. Here's the scary bit. The projection is that by 2050, we will have 1.2 billion people.

Tom: [00:23:40] Yeah. It's astonishing is that both internally displaced and cross borders. Both. Both. Yeah. I mean, it's just absolutely.

Christiana: [00:23:46] Forcibly displaced because they cannot survive where they are.

Paul: [00:23:49] And there's no real reason to believe they're ever going to be going back, you know? So this is like a forever disaster.

Tom: [00:23:54] I mean, it's not only heartbreaking, but it also speaks to the complexity terrifying, terrifying, and the complexity of the politics that's going to happen as a result of all of this is going to change everything we do.

Christiana: [00:24:03] Well, because you can understand that countries are going to, like, start to close their borders.

Paul: [00:24:08] We're already there. I mean, if I'm not mistaken, a very large number of the people going into the United States from the South are suffering from weather related agricultural disruption. So, you know, Trump build the wall. And the US election being about immigration is essentially climate change driven. So we're right in it now.

Tom: [00:24:23] So these are the tools, right? I mean this is the mitigation sequestration market's adaptation. Anything else you want to add? And then we should start thinking about.

Christiana: [00:24:29] How it has to be put on the list.

Tom: [00:24:31] Okay.

Christiana: [00:24:31] Yeah. Because it is critically important for developing countries and loss and damages basically. How do you deal with impacts that are slow moving, such as sea level rise? Right. These are not acute weather extreme events but slow moving. And it's also taken ten years for the Cop or for countries to finally agree on a fund that is going to respond to loss and damage. And it has just been created, headquartered in the Philippines. But they still have to stand up.

Tom: [00:25:04] They forget the money in that.

Christiana: [00:25:05] You get the money in, you know, stand up. The whole governance system of this. I mean, ten years later.

Paul: [00:25:11] They did it, though.

Christiana: [00:25:12] They did it, but it took ten years.

Paul: [00:25:14] Yeah. Yeah. No. Okay.

Tom: [00:25:15] I don't feel like story, isn't it? No problem. All right.

Christiana: [00:25:18] So finally.

Tom: [00:25:19] Yes.All right.

Christiana: [00:25:21] The third piece, the assessment of progress. How do we know whether we're progressing or not.

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