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No wonder Donald Trump hates the Paris agreement. A decade on from its historic adoption, the UN accord has normalized the fact that climate change is a serious threat that humans caused and must address.
The US President will doubtless keep claiming that climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and that green energy is a “scam”, but he is up against it.
Alas, this does not mean the agreement has been a flawless success. Far from it. The nearly 200 countries that signed it have failed to stop fossil fuel use from rising to record highs, which means record levels of greenhouse gases are fueling record global temperatures and record weather extremes.
The UN has had to admit the world is getting closer to overshooting the agreement’s aim to limit long-term global warming to 1.5C more than it was in the late 1800s, a level it passed for one calendar year for the first time in 2024.
You could argue, as political scientist Jessica Green does in her recent book Existential Politics, that “the Paris agreement is teetering on the brink of complete irrelevance”. You could go further and say it is part of a UN climate process that has become an elaborate form of greenwashing because it gives the world the impression of climate progress that is nothing of the sort.
Yet writing off the agreement as a total failure would be wrong. To begin with, although we can never know what a world without it would have looked like, it is not hard to guess. It would have been far easier for leaders in big fossil fuel-producing nations to resist emission-cutting policies if the accord had not cemented such climate action into mainstream thinking.
And if the agreement was pointless, would Trump have bothered pulling the US out of it, twice? Maybe, but although efforts to cut emissions have been inadequate, they have not been meaningless. Ten years ago, the world was heading for around 4C of warming by the end of the century. Today, scientists put it closer to 2.7C or lower. This is still dangerously high but it is an improvement, and it has occurred because of a slowing in the growth of emissions that looked far from inevitable before Paris.
In the decade before 2015, emissions were rising by 1.7 per cent a year. But in the decade since they have slowed to 0.3 per cent a year, according to analysts at the UK’s Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit think-tank.
This slowdown has followed a striking surge in renewable power that has blindsided some energy forecasters. The think-tank shows that the International Energy Agency’s 2015 outlook had global solar power capacity reaching around 530GW by 2024. The world added more than that amount in the past year alone.
The total amount of installed solar capacity is now more than four times what was predicted in 2015 and the story is similar for wind power. Electric vehicles also soared to more than 20 per cent of new car sales globally last year, six years ahead of forecasts.
One reason experts didn’t see this coming is that the cost of many green technologies fell so much faster than expected as they were deployed. This made it easier for countries around the world to encourage the growth of cleaner energy.
One country in particular has played an outsized role: China. The billions it has poured into green technologies have helped to drive down costs, while turning it into the world’s renewables superpower, though it is still also the biggest carbon polluter.
It is hard to argue Beijing acted because of anything to do with the Paris agreement. Its unparalleled green industrial policy fitted its wider economic and trade aims. Still, its growing exports of clean energy technology are undoubtedly making it easier for other countries to meet the climate plans they are required to lodge every five years under the Paris agreement. These plans still don’t add up to enough collective action to cut emissions at the pace needed. But they have spurred big shifts in areas such as electricity generation which, together with heating, accounts for around 30 per cent of global emissions.
In the first half of this year, renewables overtook coal generation for the first time on record. Solar power alone met 83 per cent of the increase in electricity demand, squeezing the use of fossil fuels in some countries, the Ember energy research group shows.
Against this, green energy growth forecasts have been sharply downgraded in the world’s largest economy, thanks to the Trump administration’s efforts to prolong the fossil fuel era. That is a reminder that multilateralism has enormous constraints. The UN and its environmental agreements are only ever going to be as meaningful as the governments forging them will allow.
The Paris agreement would be impossible to negotiate today, because of Trump. It was always going to be more of a diplomatic triumph than a scientific victory. It has made a difference, but it is not yet nearly enough. Whether it will ever deliver all its architects hoped for is the great question of our time.
Ten years since Paris
In 2015 nearly 200 countries signed a historic agreement to fight climate change. What has changed in that time?
