2C or not 2C? When cool is not what it seems

This post was originally written on December 11th, 2015.

The United States has just taken the lead in the climate negotiations, pushing for a more ambitious agreement.

That sentence right there is a knee-slapper for those who have spent much time following the international climate negotiations. The notion that the U.S. — the most retrograde, destructive, conservative, unambitious country in the negotiations — is now pushing for more ambition is downright risible.

Except that it’s sort of true. The U.S. is indeed a member of the “high ambition coalition,” a group of 100 countries (out of 195) pushing to limit global warming to 1.5C, among other goals. That is indeed ambitious — the planet is already running about 1C warmer than pre-industrial times, and momentum in the climate system means that limiting warming to 1.5C would require zero emissions by mid-century: a crash-landing for the fossil fuel-based economy, rather than a gentle glide path.

And therein lies the catch. Because neither the U.S. nor any of the other major emitters are planning anything like a crash landing. The U.S. has promised very modest reductions in its emissions — a plan completely inconsistent with 1.5C. So why in the world would it endorse such a strong goal?

The answer, as usual, is about politics. The U.S. is accustomed to getting its way in most international negotiations, but has been repeatedly frustrated in the climate talks — an off-again, on-again alignment between the European Union and the “G-77 and China,” the bloc of 133 developing countries, has proven too strong for the U.S. to overwhelm, creating a logjam in the negotiations. So for years, the primary negotiating objective of the U.S. has been to split up the G-77 and China. And now it is finally happening, through the most unexpected of means.

The G-77 bloc has been under pressure for some time. The small island states, whose membership partly overlaps with the G-77, emerged around 2009 as an alternate moral force in the negotiations, putting a stronger emphasis on limiting climate change than on development (and its concomitant emissions). As the carbon budget available to humanity has continued to shrink, and the impacts of global warming start to bite, more and more countries have been willing to concede their right to future emissions in the hopes of reining in climate change. The formation of the V20 — the 20 countries most vulnerable to climate change — was an explicit step in that direction.

But perhaps the biggest blow to the G-77 and China bloc was China’s bilateral deal with the US in late 2014. China has its own reasons to cut greenhouse gas emissions — its cities are choking on air pollution from fossil fuels — and it has always been the heavyweight of the bloc.

With China out, India has become the most vocal proponent of the “right to carbon space” viewpoint, laying out plans to massively build out its coal-fired energy sector. In assembling a broad coalition to write 1.5C into the text, the U.S. has neatly pulled the rug out from India’s feet, leaving it awkwardly defending a weaker 2C goal.

All this would be fine if the U.S. were prepared to walk its talk. That would require a crash decarbonization plan for the rich countries, with the developing countries following soon thereafter. But crash decarbonization is no more than a pipe dream; even as it writes the 1.5C goal into international law, the U.S. is planning to blow right past it. That will accomplish nothing — except breaking up that troublesome coalition that dared defy the U.S.

Photo credit: “Handshake” by Aidan Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0