Rarely has the chasm between global reality and global diplomacy loomed larger. Over the past several months the urgency of the climate threat has exploded as tipping points we thought were decades away pound at our doorways; we suffer on a daily basis the hottest weather in hundreds of thousands of years; an entire American city vanishes in flames, while one in Libyavanishes beneath a crumbling dam after a stronger-than-normal storm. At the same time, the economic benefits of rapid decarbonization have been spectacularly on display across the world, as China uses its investments in electric vehicles to challenge Europe’s engineering finest automotive engineering at the recent Munich auto show.
This week signals the opening round of climate diplomacy season, as the UN General Assembly and the Secretary General’s Climate Summit convene in New York. Climate scientists just issued their stocktake of the horrifying state of the national commitments made since the Paris Agreement; it revealed that existing pledges barely nudge us towards the essential 2030 benchmark of cutting emissions almost in half.
India’s leadership of the just concluded G20 had to stretch hard to extract verbal global support for a vital annual tripling of global investments in renewable energy to replace coal, gas and oil — and the implementation commitments remained on the table. It’s not that we can’t afford it.
Renewable electrons are cheaper than those from polluting hydrocarbons — but the…