341: Paris, 10 Years On - Has it Changed the World?
This week, we pull back the curtain on the Paris Agreement - the moment that changed global climate politics. A decade later we ask, what has it truly delivered?
About this episode
Ten years ago, a gavel dropped in a conference hall north of Paris. It was the moment the world agreed on a strategic plan for one of the most consequential transformations in human history. But, a decade later, what has the Paris Agreement truly delivered?
Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson pull back the curtain on the moment that changed global climate politics. The emotional reality of that night, the fragile trust built after the failure of Copenhagen, and the architecture of cooperation that still shapes the world today.
Looking back, they ask: was it diplomacy’s greatest breakthrough, or the beginning of a myth we still rely on? Can an agreement built on voluntary commitments survive as the world becomes increasingly fragmented? Is the Paris Agreement still our best chance at limiting the impacts of climate change - or simply the only chance we have?
Learn more:
▶️ Watch Christiana’s Ted Talk
💌 Read Christiana’s Open Letter of Gratitude
🌱 Read The Future We Choose, by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac
🌍 Dive into the Profiles of Paris - including contributions from Tom, Paul, and many former guests of the podcast
🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipe
Join the conversation:
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LinkedIn @outrageoptimism
Or get in touch with us via this form.
Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks
Planning: Caitlin Hanrahan
Exec Producer: Ellie Clifford
This is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.
Full Transcript
Transcript generated by AI. While we aim for accuracy, errors may still occur. Please refer to the episode’s audio for the definitive version
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Hello, and welcome to Outrage and Optimism. I'm Tom Rivett-Carnac.
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Christiana Figueres: I'm Christiana Figueres.
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Paul Dickinson: And I'm Paul Dickinson.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Today, 10 years on from the adoption of the Paris Agreement, we bring you a special episode looking at the failures and successes of that agreement. Thanks for being here. So I can't quite believe we've got to this point. Tomorrow, if you're listening to this episode on the day it comes out, which is the 11th of December 2025, it is one day before the 10-year anniversary of the gavel coming down in Le Bourget, north of Paris to create or adopt the Paris Agreement. Of course, it was ratified some months later. Now, we're going to get in today to the failures and successes, and maybe what is still left to be done under the Paris Agreement. But before we start, should we just watch a little video of that day?
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Paul Dickinson: And you can hear it also, listen to it if you're not watching.
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Laurent Fabius (archival clip, COP21 gavel moment): I look at the room, I see that the reaction is positive, I don't hear any objections. The Paris Agreement for the climate is accepted.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: It sort of came as a moment of shock, I remember, even though we were expecting it at that moment.
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Paul Dickinson: Just been a huge delay, if I recall.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: There had been hours delay, hadn't there? Christiana, you look so happy.
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Paul Dickinson: Everyone in the room looks so happy. Big hug, Christiana and Laurence.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: So that was the end, of course, of a very long process. How does it feel watching that again now, 10 years later, Christiana?
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Christiana Figueres: You know what I just noticed in the video for the first time? Something that I knew had happened to me, but I didn't know it was visible in the video. And that is when the gavel came down, I was frozen. And I notice now on the video that I'm the last one to stand up on the podium, because I was frozen in place. I was just so overcome by the moment, by the reality that yes, this was the adoption that we had been working toward for five years. And I was just overcome with emotion, and it took me a few seconds to say, yes, this has just happened and now you can stand up.
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Paul Dickinson: Great to hear your voice have a little bit of reality in it there.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: And Paul, I mean, you and I were sitting there. We were together with our friend Nigel Topping in the front row. I mean, listeners who maybe watched that little clip there, we were just behind, just next to where Al Gore was, and just a little off to the side. And I remember you stayed, we've talked about this before on the podcast, you stayed there for hours as you watched all the different country delegates come and stand up and talk about what it meant to them.
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Paul Dickinson: So many different countries, it's not just the USA which was very involved, and it wasn't just the EU, and it wasn't just Japan, it was Saudi Arabia, it was Egypt, it was Russia. It was everybody saying that this was a great move forward for an entirely united world. And I just want to say to you both what I think we were all aware, which was after the enormous kind of global disappointment of the Copenhagen Climate Summit, I think the world needed an agreement to avoid fatalism setting in amongst the people of this planet. So I think it was a supreme moment which was electrifying and unforgettable and historic. But how were you, Tom, with the emotions of the day?
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: I was pretty run down. I mean, it had been quite an intense couple of weeks and a very intense several months up to that point. I actually later wrote a note about how I felt a little bit later, and I put it into the profiles of Paris that we put out. And I wrote it two or three days later, and it was about coming home after the Paris agreement had been adopted. And I wrote this, I said, four hours later, I came into my home in Bonn, Germany. As I entered the house, I could hear the children playing, and my wife, Natasha, came out and saw me approaching down the corridor. She'd followed along every blow of Paris with regular voicemails from me, giving the inside story and felt the ups and downs of the weeks and indeed, the months and years as keenly as I did. She smiled back at me with a smile that looked like the lights of home, seen through the rain at night after a long and tiring walk in the darkness. I smiled back and burst into tears. So that moment captures the emotionality of the outpouring of all of this. So we'll get into the implications of what all of this means.
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Paul Dickinson: Can I have just one more particular moment? The so to say NGO party, this enormous party in this nightclub in Paris. And Christiana, as you appeared at the top of the stairs, I will for my whole life never forget the noise this vast room made. It was really something.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: It was really something. Do you have a favorite moment from those two weeks, Christiana?
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Christiana Figueres: I'm having a hard time talking.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Oh, what's happening for you?
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Christiana Figueres: I think my favorite moment was after this whole outburst of emotion and elation and celebration.
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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER — please verify (content suggests this may be Christiana continuing her own reflection, possibly mistagged due to emotional delivery): I was, yeah, I was, well, physically exhausted, but also humbled, very humbled by the meaning of what had happened.
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Christiana Figueres: And my daughters were in Paris, as you know, they were there for the whole two weeks. And after we got off the podium, they came up, and the three of us walked away. And they could tell that I needed, I needed to be physically held up because I was just so, yeah, I was so overcome, not just by exhaustion, but just by the weight of the moment and by the depth of gratitude, gratitude for so many hundreds, thousands of people who had either dedicated themselves fully or hugely participated. And I remember the three of us walked away from everyone and just, yeah, walked to a quiet space and were just there in silence, in full appreciation of this is something that we will never forget.
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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER — please verify (content suggests this may be Christiana continuing her own reflection, possibly mistagged due to emotional delivery): This is something that the world needed. This is something that the world delivered.
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Christiana Figueres: And most importantly, this is something that so many people, so many people helped in different ways.
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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER — please verify (content suggests this may be Christiana continuing her own reflection, possibly mistagged due to emotional delivery): And I remember going back afterward and writing a letter of gratitude to everyone who participated.
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Christiana Figueres: That I then put out in English, Spanish, and French, a letter of gratitude, because there was no way we could have sent personal letters to everyone that participated, because many people who helped during those five years, we didn't know and will never know.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: We didn't know.
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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER — please verify (content suggests this may be Christiana continuing her own reflection, possibly mistagged due to emotional delivery): That's true.
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Christiana Figueres: That's so true. We didn't know, because so many people helped in different ways.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: You don't happen to still have that, do you? Because I'd love to hear it again, and maybe we could share it with the listeners.
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Christiana Figueres: Well, of course, as I was mentioning it, I looked for it. So it was written on December 18th, 2015. And it is an open letter of gratitude to all. And here's what it says. To those who walked, to those who prayed, to those who sang, to those who cried, to those who challenged, to those who supported, to those who acted early, to those who came with hope, to those who came with facts, to those who used the power of their influence, to those who honored the public trust bestowed upon them, to all those, the millions of people around the world, who labored now and before, so long and so hard, I say, this is your success. Individually, for each of you, but more powerfully, collectively, for all of us. A critical milestone reached, a decisive turning point inscribed into history. We have come together to address the most daunting of challenges. We have done so by respecting our differences and setting aside our enmity, by focusing on the present we share and the future we must build together. As we celebrate this momentous step, may we remember that the journey ahead, although irreversible, will equally require our determination, our ingenuity, the best of our humanity, and above all, our community of purpose. Together we can. So that for me sums up the spirit of the Paris Agreement and the recognition that it wasn't a handful of people who were in the hall that moment. It was millions of people around the world, most of whom we will never know.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: That was beautiful, Christiana. Thank you for reminding us of that.
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Paul Dickinson: It's the orchestra that makes the music, but you do also honor the conductors. So salute to the Secretariat, the government, the teams.
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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER — please verify (content suggests this may be Christiana continuing her own reflection, possibly mistagged due to emotional delivery): Amazing.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Thank you for taking us into what all of that meant and the magnitude of that moment. Of course, 10 years is a very long time, and the world is a very different place, and we face many of the same challenges, sadly, and the world has moved on in other ways. So what we want to do in this episode is get to the heart of, where has Paris done what it needed to do? Where has it not, and where is it yet to be proved? So unless there's anything else we want to say about the memories from 10 years ago, maybe we should get into all of that.
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Paul Dickinson: Okay, so just before we get into this, Tom, can you just, I mean, our listeners are very familiar with the Paris Agreement, most of them, but just to ground this, in essence, what was delivered that day?
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Well, I'm very happy to go into it. I'll do it in 30 seconds. I would also say if there's anyone listening to this who has not heard of the Paris Agreement, then you are an absolute confounder of the algorithms and we'd love to hear from you. So what you're doing is quite statistically remarkable. Which tree have you been living in for the last 10 years? Well, to get to listening to our podcast without knowing about the Paris Agreement is a remarkable thing. So do reach out if you're listening to the podcast.
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Paul Dickinson: But having heard of it is not quite the same as knowing basically what it is, which you are about to explain, Tom.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Fair enough. Okay. So the Paris Agreement is a multilateral agreement between all countries, 196 countries, where they collectively agree to limit climate change to two degrees with best efforts to 1.5. It is based on that shared collective objective, legally binding, and will be delivered through a series of five yearly nationally determined goals. That's what it is at its core. It's got a whole bunch of things in there, also about finance, about adaptation. They're all really important. But if you want the very distilled version of how the Paris Agreement has the ability to address the climate crisis, I would say that's it.
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Christiana Figueres: I think I could say it is at its heart. It's a strategic plan that was agreed to among, as you say, all nations of the world to decarbonize the global economy over the next few decades until we reach net zero emissions. So it means everyone participates differently, of course, but everyone is moving in the same direction at different pace with different types of engagement, and everyone agrees to be measured in terms of progress toward that ultimate net zero. So it's a strategic plan.
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Paul Dickinson: I love a plan.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: The answer you just gave, I think, speaks really interestingly to how we remember Paris, because we remember it as historic and as a breakthrough. And I think there is an interesting question around whether we misremember it. We measure it against the fact that it happened rather than against what is necessary. So are we in danger in the climate movement maybe of our sort of, well, we'll always have Paris type vibe, when actually it maybe hasn't done what it's needed to do to keep humanity safe?
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Paul Dickinson: You know, we layer on to historical events subsequent meanings, and I think that's okay. There are sort of myths. I was hearing about some other Second World War myth on the rest of history that apparently Britain was never really going to be invaded, but Hitler talked it all up to make everyone, to avoid them becoming lethargic about the war. He tried to make us believe that we were about to get invaded.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Churchill, you mean, not Hitler?
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Paul Dickinson: Churchill. Well, it was the one invading. Churchill was already living in England. But the point being that we sort of use fact and fictionry to make history serve subsequent purposes in our general interests. So yeah, I think misremembering some aspects of Paris serves a function.
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Christiana Figueres: I think it's also important to understand that the Paris Agreement evolved in the context of previous efforts to have global frameworks for decarbonizing the economy. The first legally binding agreement was the Kyoto Protocol adopted in 1997 that was still operative by the way during these years in which we were preparing the Paris Agreement. And the huge difference between the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, or the two huge differences, are that the Kyoto Protocol establishes emission reductions only for developed countries, not for developing countries. And it establishes a very clear numerical target for those emission reductions. And because we understood that only reductions in the industrialized countries was insufficient, that we also had to bring in the developing world, that is why there was then an effort to negotiate a second legally binding agreement under the Convention. The first time that that was attempted was in Copenhagen in 2009. And we have spoken about that meeting being what I call the most successful failure of the United Nations because we did not get to the adoption of the agreement that was intended. And it took the next five years to finally get to the Paris Agreement. So the Paris Agreement is structurally very different from the Kyoto Protocol. And procedurally, we learned a heck of a lot from the Copenhagen Conference that was then improved on over the next few years. But I think it's important to understand that the Paris Agreement feeds on lessons learned from both Kyoto and Copenhagen.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: And that actually makes me wonder, Christiana, I mean, given that it was, as you say, the line from Kyoto, but then the failure in Copenhagen to get to the outcome. And there was so much hope and expectation. Do you think that part of the kind of Halcyon glow that sits around Paris is because it came after Copenhagen and because we had this attempt to try and reach this by international global agreement that didn't deliver, that then the fact that it then came later gave Paris even more of a sense of, trying to just like see through, we've got kind of myths and uncertainties in our minds around Paris. It was a moment of real breakthrough and coming together. And yet it's also true that it hasn't taken us kind of far enough. So why do we remember it in this very, very positive light, when actually you can look at it and say, you know, we're still not heading for where we need to be 10 years later?
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Christiana Figueres: Yeah, let's talk about that one, because I'm not sure that I'm just going to take that sentence as you uttered it.
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Paul Dickinson: Leading question from the barrister. Would you not agree? Would you not agree?
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Christiana Figueres: But yes, I definitely would agree that the global despair that came after the failed Copenhagen conference, the global despair, set a very important mood context for what came after it. And the fact that as a world, as a community of nations, we moved from despair to trust and possibility, and then delivering the outcome that everyone wanted. That contrast between those two, I mean, it is difficult to think of two multilateral meetings that were procedurally so different, structurally so different, and from an outcome perspective, and from a global mood perspective, so completely different. So yes, the contrast between Copenhagen and Paris makes Paris even more exciting. It's an interesting, it's a counterfactual question, actually. Would Paris have unleashed so much excitement had we not had a failure in 2009?
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Right. It's an interesting thing to think about, isn't it? What do you think, Paul?
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Paul Dickinson: I'm absolutely with this kind of morale of the billions of people across the world. You know, people have to get beyond an idea that we're stuck at the international level. The Paris Agreement abolished the idea that there was some global impediment to us moving forward, and that was a part of its critical delivery.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: So would you say, both of you, because it's, you know, greatest diplomatic breakthrough in history is how it was described in The Economist, Barack Obama said it was the thing he was most proud of delivering when he was in office. Does it deserve its reputation?
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Christiana Figueres: Absolutely. I mean, I'm waiting for Paul to say something that... Absolutely. It deserves its reputation.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: In a very pithily, why does it deserve that reputation?
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Christiana Figueres: Because it establishes an intentionality of direction and markers of progress that all countries have agreed to.
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Paul Dickinson: An architecture, a process, a platform that can run through decades to deliver the outcome we require above and beyond the fray and the ups and downs of particular political leaders. And there is a small but not tiny section of your house, Christiana, devoted to the awards given to you by practically every government in response to the fact that this is so critically important.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: I think this can be a huge leap, but part of what we're trying to look at is, is it? The Paris Agreement has this halo effect that sits around it as this transformative moment. But precisely the challenge now is, Paris Agreement wasn't magic, it was about, it's not about the poetry of the text, it's about the discipline of the implementation. But I want to read you a little something here. Okay, so where does this come from? In order to promote international cooperation and harmony, we, the nations of the world, accept obligations, we will never resort to war, we will establish open, just, and honorable relationships between us. Now that, to break my own jeopardy, comes from the formation of the League of Nations, which of course now we regard as one of the greatest diplomatic failures in history. But at the time it was seen as the great moment of the coming together of the nations of the world. And what I'm trying to get at here is, yes, the Paris Agreement has the potential that you have set out, but is it doing that? And what is the evidence that it's working? And we should of course be optimistic and see the positive side, but there's a lot of challenges in the world as well. And I think listeners would want us to look at both sides of that story 10 years on from that historic day.
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Christiana Figueres: Yeah, and I mean, we can go that into the micro as long as we understand that the micro is there to serve the macro, the macro evolution, and that we may have, in fact, in the future, other agreements at the micro level, but the macro evolution and the direction of that evolution is not changing. So we can go into the micro and we can play and we can say, you know, forget the Paris Agreement, fine. Then we would have to get something else.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Christiana Figueres: So yes, we might as well take advantage of the fact that we have this one and get our act together. But if we didn't have this, we would have to be sitting there trying to negotiate another one.
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Paul Dickinson: What do you say to these voices that say, yes, I agree with you, Christiana, we had, we did engage with the global system conditions risk for the first time. That was a huge breakthrough. But the sovereignty of nations, what's sometimes called the Westphalian system, means that the Paris Agreement was bound by the limitations that no nation can compel another nation. And therefore, at some sense, Absolutely. Some people will argue that what we needed at Paris was some kind of compelling force, and the Paris Agreement lacks it.
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Christiana Figueres: Well, good luck with that one. Good luck with that one, because nations are sovereign. No nation can tell another nation what to do. And that was proven by the CURTA protocol, by the way. So the CURTA protocol, as we know, imposed legally binding obligations on all industrialized countries, and was a punitive system where if the industrialized countries did not deliver the emission reductions that they were obligated to, they had to pay a fine, a fine, a monetary fine. So it was based on a punitive, high, high compliance system. December 2011, I think it was the 29th, maybe the 30th of December, I get a letter from the Harper administration in Canada, saying Canada exits the CURTA protocol. That's it. It was just a letter.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: No penalty to exit, so therefore they had no fine.
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Paul Dickinson: No kind of small talk. How have you been? Nothing like that.
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Christiana Figueres: Why did they exit at the end of December? Because on the 1st of January, they would have had to pay a fine for the emissions that they were not reducing. So it just takes a letter because every single country is sovereign. And we've seen that with the United States under Trump. They have just, you know, sent a little letter and exited the Paris agreement. But my point is the Kyoto Protocol showed us that punitive measures, very, very strict compliance mechanisms, are no guarantee that anybody is going to do anything because they can just exit. So to everyone who says, why is the Paris agreement not more legally binding? Why is it not a high compliance system? Why are there no penalties?
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Why doesn't Costa Rica invade if people don't meet their target?
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Christiana Figueres: For example, because it's of absolutely no use. It would be a nice little political showing, but it is teeth that cannot bite. So what's the point of putting the teeth into the treaty?
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: That's a very helpful distinction. If you say actually, that view that sometimes many of us have in our lives, that we should just force everyone to do it, when you actually delve into it doesn't work.
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Christiana Figueres: Can you force your teenage children to do anything?
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: I think I have more chance of forcing Canada to do something than I do my teenage children. But yeah. So would you, Christiana, say that a network of voluntary nationally determined contributions is the worst way to deal with climate change apart from all the others?
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Christiana Figueres: I wouldn't say it's the best or the worst. I would say it's the only possible.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: It's the only possible. And the proof of that pudding should be, is it keeping us safe? Because Paris should be judged based on how historically unusual it was and what a breakthrough it was, and more importantly, does it solve the problem? So let's go there.
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Christiana Figueres: No, no, I really want to pick, sorry, I really want to pick on your choice of verb. It does not solve the problem. It never was expected to solve the problem. It will not. It cannot solve the problem. We cannot solve climate change. Let us just, you know, swallow that very, very difficult pill. We're too late to solve climate change. The only thing that the Paris Agreement and countries that ratified it, all countries, seeks to do is to ameliorate the impacts of climate change. But let us not put this into a binary thinking system of can we solve or are we condemned? Neither of the two. What Paris is trying to do is to seek the middle way, to say neither can we guarantee success, we can't solve this for sure, but also we don't necessarily have to be condemned to the worst impacts of climate change. Let's find a middle way. That's what Paris is trying to do.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: So there's a lot of ambiguity in that middle way, right? If the middle way is yes, we can't solve it, but we can really ameliorate the worst of it, we can prevent dangerous tipping points, we can support the development of humanity, and we can provide wild space for nature, and we can all be okay-ish in the midst of that. That's sort of manageable. If it's we can't solve it, but amelioration means actually various tipping points are going to get triggered, then are we putting our faith in the wrong place to continue to trust in the Paris Agreement? Would it be better to say at this point, it can't ameliorate it enough, and we should be building other structures that can try and do that for us?
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Christiana Figueres: Well, you're welcome to start another process. Good luck with that. I think I'll go back to the teenagers. Especially in this geopolitical condition. Be my guest.
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Paul Dickinson: We did before we started recording. We had this little discussion, and it's true that the Paris Agreement does not prevent other initiatives from coming forward. It's simply a very important foundational architecture that allows us to proceed in the direction with the NDC ratchet mechanism, which is absolutely brilliant, and various other mechanisms.
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Christiana Figueres: What Paris does is it sets the direction of decarbonization. Now, the fact that there are umpteen different alliances and groups of the willing that have come forward since then means that there are many different ways of addressing decarbonization and increase of adaptation. Many different ways, yes, exactly. So what Paris just does is it says, dudes, we have to move in this direction and we have to have markers along the way to find out how we're doing or how we're not doing. But it certainly does not stand in the way of all kinds of coalitions of the willing, whether that is just private sector like the climate pledge or whether that involves sub-national or even national governments in private sector, etc. And in Berlin, we saw so many of these, right? We saw so many coalitions either reporting what they have done.
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Paul Dickinson: The Action Agenda event was completely full to the rafters.
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Christiana Figueres: Yeah, the Action Agenda. Yeah, exactly.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah. So, I mean, obviously there is so much which we can celebrate and we often have on this podcast about the Paris Agreement, but there are obviously some things in there as well that have been disappointing or things we hoped would happen in 2015 that have not materialized. When we often say that we have bent the curve of temperature, and it's true, we have from where we were before, but we're still heading for nearly three degrees of warming. So that may be below the five degrees or so we were heading for before Paris, but it's still not 1.5 and it's still more than enough to trigger these very alarming natural feedback loops. The nationally determined commitments that governments are putting forward are not consistent with the science, they ignore the urgency of the issue. And tragically with the way development is in the world, the climate finance gap remains even bigger than it was 10 years ago, now a trillion a year at a time when aid budgets are actually being cut back. We always knew that nationally determined contributions would be voluntary, that there would be no overarching enforcement. We've talked about some of the challenges of that, and despite the improvement of quality, they're not in line with the outcome we're looking for. We don't have binding language on the phase out of fossil fuels, which is really where the problem comes from. Adaptation remains a kind of poor cousin to mitigation, despite the fact that it's more and more clear that we're going to see the necessity for more adaptation around the world and loss and damage for the places where we can't adapt. And the global stock take, which was produced two years ago in Dubai, revealed significant gaps in our ability to get on top of this, but there's really not been any coherent attempt to address those barriers. So there are some fundamental flaws that sit at the heart of the implementation of the agreement. Would you disagree with that, Christiana?
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Christiana Figueres: No, I think you said it exactly right. There are some flaws that sit at the implementation of the agreement. That's the point. That's exactly the point, right? Were we implementing the agreement to the T, we would be in a different world. So, our issue is not do we have a clear path forward. Our issue is we're not advancing on that path as we ought to. What Paris did was it said, okay, this is the marathon we're going to run, and we're going to, you know, every five kilometers, we're going to check in. And we are definitely not running the marathon at the pace that we ought to be. That doesn't mean that there's a problem with the marathon. It means we, the runners, are not running at the pace.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Better pick up the pace, yeah.
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Christiana Figueres: My point is this. We have to assume the responsibility that we, as runners, are not doing our job. That is not the fault of the marathon. That is the fault of the runners. So let us establish responsibility where responsibility lies. The runners got together and said, this is the race that we're going to run. And they all agreed. And now we're not running that race at the pace that we should. So let's just be very, very clear about that.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: I think it's a great point. I mean, if the League of Nations failed, was that only the failure of countries in the 1930s, or was it also the failure of the structure of the League of Nations agreement? And I'm actually, despite implications or appearances, I'm not actually comparing the Paris Agreement to the League of Nations, but I think that the success of the Paris Agreement is, is it implementable? Are people able to go ahead and implement what was in it?
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Christiana Figueres: Very good point.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: You can't completely pull apart the marathon. You might say, come on, runners, keep up, but if the marathon is going over the Himalayas, not many people are going to finish it.
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Paul Dickinson: The metaphors are getting very complicated here, marathon over the Himalayas. I mean, we're 10 years in, okay, and we've got quite a bit further to run to 2050. How are we doing?
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Well, let's take a quick break, and then when we come back, let's talk about the ways in which the Paris Agreement has lived up to its expectations. So see you in a sec. Okay, so welcome back, everyone. Despite the fact that I talked before the break at how the warming trajectory has not dropped as far as it needs to, it has been very significant. We were previously heading for more like 4.5 degrees. Now, it's somewhere between 2.5 and 3. Yes, it's not enough, but as we always said, the Paris Agreement was structured in such a way that you can continually make progress and over time, as the economics improves, then you can bring down the temperature trajectory, more on that in a minute. 1.5 degrees felt actually, it's hard to remember this, but if you think about Paris, 1.5 degrees was not really on the table until the islands came forward and insisted that it be there. Now, yes, we're at a challenging moment. It looks like we're breaching that, but we haven't given up on it. It has become a globally defining target and it's very important. We've established also the kind of climate architecture for dealing with this issue through the Paris Agreement. That is very strong despite even the US pulling out, it remains powerful and it's undeniable that trillions of dollars have been mobilized for clean energy. So let's just look at that for a minute. 1.8 trillion for clean energy investments in 2023.
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Paul Dickinson: 2.1 in 2024.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Amazing. Okay. Thank you, Paul. Renewable cost down 80 to 90 percent since Paris. Battery cost down nearly 90 percent since Paris. And EV sales, electric vehicle sales, now 20 to 30 percent in major markets. Now you can say, would this stuff have happened without the Paris Agreement? I think the counterfactual is very difficult. But I think what you can say is that the Paris Agreement has provided confidence. It's provided a pathway. It's provided the platform for investment from companies and investors and government support around the world that has driven down these costs and has made it possible to actually see that the solutions to the climate crisis are now more cost effective than continuing to create the problems. And inside the Paris Agreement itself, we do see the NDC, National Determined Contribution, Ratship Mechanism, work. Countries are coming back to the table. The transparency and accountability framework is in place. And the stock take is creating diplomatic efforts to deal with this. So if you want to make the alternative argument, you can say, the Paris Agreement wasn't magic, it was never going to solve a complex global issue that had been emerging since the industrial revolution in 10 years. But it has changed our future by changing the economics and changing political will. And actually, it's the next 10 years when we're really going to see this affect our temperature trajectory and have an impact on the way we're going to live in the future.
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Paul Dickinson: Look, here's two things about the Paris effect that I want to draw your attention to. I have a friend who listens to the show, and he was with someone senior, head of a government somewhere, and they were talking about how they were putting wind energy somewhere. And he said, why are you putting wind energy there? And this person said, well, because of our nationally determined contribution. So you actually have governments accountable. But I think the bigger one that I want to draw your attention to about the Paris effect is the mood music, the conceptual signal sent out to every single entrepreneur, every single corporation, every single investor in the whole world. It's like, oh, all the world's governments have agreed, we're going to get to net zero by 2050 or whatever it is. All the world's governments have agreed that they don't want to try and avoid crossing this threshold of one and a half degrees. Therefore, there needs to be the most massive decarbonization of our energy system. Therefore, we will move forward with investments that will lead to these conclusions. Now, it's true that we've had some, what's been described as political pushbacks, but I just think it's commercial control of politics. I think it's always wrong for us to cast this as a political problem. I think it is a commercial intervention in politics. The three biggest oil producers, the US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, in concert have been doing everything they can to try and undermine action on climate change. But every additional solar, every additional wind, every additional electric vehicle, every additional battery storage diminishes the political power of the fossil fuel industries. So I think the moon music and the trajectory will get us through. I personally believe Paris has been critical to setting them that tone in the world, because it's actually about billions of decisions made by billions of people.
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Christiana Figueres: I like that, Paul. I like that a lot. And it brings up for me my favorite analogy in life, which is the difference between noise and signal. And I think we have to be able to differentiate those two things in our personal life and certainly in this global issue. So from that perspective, what Paris does is it sends the signal of where we're going. And then, of course, there's a lot of noise. And of course, there will always be a lot of noise. But we have to through the noise, we have to be able to differentiate. Yes, there's a lot of noise. And what is the signal? Come back to the signal and increase the pace of pursuit of that signal.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: So, let's just think, I know we're coming towards the end of this episode, but I would love to just wrap up a little bit by thinking, when the Paris Agreement was put together, it had a few different date horizons in it. One, of course, was nationally determined contributions, which are in five yearly increments. But we talked much more about 2050 and 2100. And of course, we're only a small step towards those milestones that are put in place in the Paris Agreement to reach net zero in the second half of the century.
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Christiana Figueres: That's why it's a marathon.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Exactly. So looking forward, you know, 10 years in, do we feel like, you know, look at the geopolitics in the world today, the fact that we've got all these challenges with, you know, migration has become a much bigger political issue. We've got energy challenges, we've got conflict challenges. What role will the Paris Agreement continue to play? Say, the first threshold, which is now 25 years away. Do we feel like it will have renewed emphasis and relevance or is it going to begin to slip away from relevance for humanity? I say this looking at Christiana, what do you think, Christiana?
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Christiana Figueres: Well, you know, Tom, it may not be a bad idea to step back a bit and see the bigger picture because this is not the first time we, as a human race, has moved from one energy source to another. As a way of transforming the world that surrounds us as our human reach and frankly as social and political control. So, let's remember, well, we weren't around, but anyway, let us remember, the early humans discovered how to make fire and then how to control it. What fire enabled them to do was to cook, to have warmth at night, to basically be able to protect themselves, at least to the level of families and tribes. So, the nomadic tribes formed and thrived around the hearth. Then, next step, more or less 10,000 BC to about the 1700s, we moved from the fire era to the agrarian era, during which we used muscle power, human and animal, wind and water. We needed irrigation and wheels for the water. And what that agrarian era energy allowed us was it enabled settlement, it enabled agriculture, the rise of cities and some empires. Societies grew and developed hierarchies, laws, religions, roads, and trade extended the reach. Mostly, however, all of this, let's call it civilization, now settled civilization mostly within your own continent. Then we moved to another age that most of us struggle with so much, which is more or less from 1700 to 1900, let's say. That's the fossil fuel age. That's when we discovered coal, then oil and gas. That's when we developed steam engines, electricity. That is what allowed us industrial dominance. For the first time, our energy sources were based on extraction from the earth. Very important, completely different model of energy from what had come before. And based on this extraction from the earth, nations expanded empires, factories, powered urbanization. And in fact, even the energy control meant military power. So colonization spread through fossil fuel ships and trains. What this meant was that for the first time we had major cross-continental transformation. And then, of course, in the 20th century, we moved, unfortunately, very easily to planetary reach with electrification and globalization. We built out that fossil fuel economy from before. We built our grids. We built the oil economy. We had cars, planes. We now had planetary reach. And let's remember that that kind of energy that we developed allowed for mass communication that now seems outmoded but was very, very cutting edge at the time. Radio, TV, air travel, global corporations, consumer society exploded, again, still based on extraction as the concept behind our energy source. And so it wasn't until more or less the 1970s where we began to become aware of the limits of that extraction, of the devastating effects of CO2 pollution, the devastating effects of inequality, climate risk, et cetera. And at the same time, how interesting, we began to be more aware of global interdependence, both at the same time. And then, of course, in this 21st century, we finally begin to see the next energy era, the next energy era, very exciting, the rise of renewables. And what this actually allows is distributed, not concentrated, distributed energy empowers communities. Nations begin to shift away from extraction to harvesting of energy, harvesting the sun, harvesting the wind, a very, very different model of energy sourcing. And what that is doing right now, here, in front of our eyes, is setting the basis for what the Chinese have already called the Ecological Civilization. Because this kind of energy enables not just control, but care. Humans have finally redefined, or are in the process of redefining, that we don't necessarily have to extract and dominate the earth. But maybe, just maybe, we move from extraction and domination to stewardship. Energy systems that could potentially, and we're moving in that direction, support justice, equity, and certainly healing of our relationship with nature. So, what do we notice from this evolution? I would say three things that we learn. First, we have always evolved as a human race towards superior performing energy sources. Always. Second, this is the first time that we have needed a legal global instrument to help us move from one energy source to another. Why did we need it this time? I would argue because of the resistance, or let's call it the stranglehold of the incumbent industry. We didn't need a legal global instrument to move from candles and kerosene torches to electricity. This is the first time that that energy transition is socially and politically and legally directed. And thirdly, this is the first time in which we have limited time to take the decisive step toward the next energy source. We have never had that limitation in time when we've moved from one energy source to another in the past. And that is why, Tom and Paul, I feel that the Paris Agreement, just to come back to the topic where we were, close the big loop, that's why I feel it's such a historical marker. Because for the first time, we have developed a legal foundation for moving from one energy source to another. And more than that, I feel that the Paris Agreement is the turning point from extraction as the model of our energy source to regeneration and stewardship. Yes, at a material technological level, we don't have any other choice but to decarbonize. We just don't. But at a social cultural level, we are redefining our human reach, our human impact, from domination of the earth to stewardship and care. From energy systems that destroy to energy systems that support justice, equity, healing of our relationship with nature. At least in theory, our responsibility is to make that a reality. So summa summarum, sorry for this such a long story that I took you along. But as our energy evolved from fire to fossil fuels, to the sun, our power grew, for sure, from the warmth of the heart to planetary domination, and now to the most important turning point. And that is the question. Will we use energy sources to continue to destroy the earth, or will we use them to heal it? I actually don't think that we have much of a choice. If we humans want to stay on this earth, we don't have a choice but to move toward these very, very different energy sources.
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Paul Dickinson: So let me just add to that by referencing this marathon. It was not the case that all the countries in the world decided that they would run a marathon in 2015 because they wanted to get fit or something like that. They decided to run a marathon, specifically because if they don't run a marathon, we're facing these inconceivable risks.
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Christiana Figueres: Exactly.
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Paul Dickinson: People I know and admire have their grandchild or children as their WhatsApp logos. The future generations are of great importance. There are many, many, many hundreds of millions, possibly even billions of people alive today who will be alive in 2100 and certainly their children will be. So there is absolutely no way out of this. So although you get the complete madness of Trump's flatter speech at the UN, or you have this increased migration driven by climate change, by the way, or you have populism saying, oh, we should blame the migrants for everything, or you have any number of other events coming along, it will be the drumbeat of extreme weather and the basic logic of climate change impacts if something's true in reality, it must be true in theory, that assures me that we will not forget or melt away the nature of this marathon. But we are absolutely essentially compelled to be committed to it, even if there are these little bits of noise like Trump popping in and out, the signal will remain.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: I like the amendment to the marathon analogy, this is actually we're running this not because we want to necessarily run a marathon, but because we don't have any choice. And therefore we may as well throw ourselves into it with as much determination and courage as we can.
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Paul Dickinson: I met someone from the Ukraine and I said, congratulations on the bravery of your people. And this person said, we didn't want to be brave. We don't have a choice. We're running this marathon.
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Christiana Figueres: Yeah.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah.
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Christiana Figueres: Exactly. Yeah.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Ten years. We're all a bit older. Ten years older. Paris Agreement's first ten years. And despite various challenges that the implementation is facing, we continue to move forward because we don't have a choice. I think that's a pretty good way for us to end. And hopefully the momentum will continue to build in the coming years. Thank you for listening everybody. Lovely to talk to you both. We'll be back next week.
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Paul Dickinson: Looking forward to the next 70 percent of the marathon. Bye for now.
