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52 Climate brief Politics The Economist April 25th 2020
Fossil fuels are the bedrock of industrial
society. Even though the alternative of re-
newable energy has, since 1988, become far
more plausible, a decisive move away from
fossil carbon still means a wrenching and
unprecedented shift.
To many convinced environmentalists
that shift seems self-evidently worthwhile.
It fits with an ideology that commits them
to lives that have less impact on the natural
world. But in the face of climate change, in-
dividual willingness to sacrifice the fruits
of a high-energy lifestyle is not enough.
People, and countries, that do not share
such motivations must act, too.
The challenge of climate politics is to
overcome these differences by negotiating
ways forward that can gain general assent.
It is a challenge that, despite those remark-
able four years, has not been met. Instead
of emissions in 2005 being 20% lower than
they were in 1988, they were 34% higher. By
2017 they were 22% higher still.
Think global, act global
The Toronto attendees’ belief that an inter-
national agreement could bring down car-
bon-dioxide emissions rested in part on an
agreement reached a year before to limit
the production of ozone-destroying chem-
icals, most notable among them the
chlorofluorocarbons (cfcs) used in fridges
and spray-cans. That Montreal protocol
looked like a template in two ways.
A history of action and inaction The first was that it was global. Since the
The challenge without precedent 1960s the environmental movement had
increasingly taken “saving the planet” as
its rhetorical focus. But practical environ-
mental protections, such as clean-air regu-
lations, almost all worked on a national, or
at most regional, basis. Because the world’s
cfcs are thoroughly mixed together before
The first of six weekly climate briefs looks at the history and politics of attempts
to tackle global warming they reach the stratosphere’s ozone layer,
the Montreal protocol had to be genuinely
n june 1988 scientists, environmental A mere four years later a global compact global, and thus balance the needs of devel-
Iactivists and politicians gathered in To- against climate change had been signed. oped and developing countries.
ronto for a “World Conference on the Even with a boost from the end of the cold The second was that the Montreal pro-
Changing Atmosphere”. The aspect of its war, which made global action on shared tocol required remarkable faith in science.
changing that alarmed them most was the concerns seem newly possible and provid- Unlike most pollution controls, which try
build-up of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse ed an opening for a new eschatology to re- to reduce harm already being done, it
gas. In the late 1950s, when systematic place that of nuclear Armageddon, that called for expensive action to deal with a
monitoring of the atmosphere’s carbon-di- seemed like a remarkable political success problem that, despite the dramatic discov-
oxide level began, it stood at around 315 on the part of those pressing for action. ery of the Antarctic ozone hole in 1985, was
parts per million (ppm). By that summer, it Unfortunately, a global agreement to not yet hurting people. It was based instead
had reached 350ppm—and a heatwave was act is not the same thing as global action. on the likelihood of future catastrophe.
bringing record temperatures to much of Climate scientists realised that an emis-
North America. In this series sions-reduction agreement on greenhouse
The week before the Toronto confer- gases would need a similarly strong con-
ence James Hansen, a climate scientist at 1 The politics of climate action sensus on their dangers. This led to the cre-
nasa, had pointed to the heatwave when ation in late 1988 of the Intergovernmental
2 Modelling the greenhouse effect
telling the us Senate that it was time “to Panel on Climate Change (ipcc). Including
stop waffling…and say that the evidence is 3 The carbon cycle, present and future researchers from governments, academia,
pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is 4 The impacts and their timescales industry and non-governmental organisa-
here”. The Toronto conference took a simi- tions, the processes of the ipcc required
lar view, calling for an international effort 5 Engineering an energy transition governments to sign off on its conclusions,
to reduce global carbon-dioxide emissions 6 The imperative of adaptation so reducing their ability to ignore them.
by 20% by 2005. The ipcc’s first assessment of climate- 1
