Paris pact in peril: Global Green Goals now Nearly Impossible To Reach

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A new study from Climate Action Tracker shows that the chance the world can hold temperatures increases to 1.5C by the end of 2100 — a tenet of the 2015 Paris Agreement — has become virtually impossible. At the current emission rate, the figure will be up from 2.7C to 2.9C, which means extreme weather events will likely become part of daily existence.

“On the negative side,” the authors wrote, “fossil fuel subsidies remain at an all-time high and funding for fossil fuel-prolonging projects quadrupled between 2021 and 2022. Unsurprisingly, this means that our …. projections expect an emissions peak by the end of the decade, but lack the steep decline necessary in that period to reach the Paris Agreement goal.”

Overall, there have been no meaningful changes in the use of fossil fuels by the world’s largest polluters — China, the U.S. and India. At the same time, the money which was to be earmarked for poor nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions has barely been forthcoming.

One of the authors of the report, Sofia Gonzales-Zuñiga, a climate policy specialist at Climate Analytics, said, “We are clearly failing to bend the curve. As the world edges closer to these dangerous climate thresholds, the need for immediate, stronger action to reverse this trend becomes ever more urgent.” The need for stronger action has been the major message from scientists since before the 2015 Paris agreement.

A matter of costs
The reasons behind the problem are simple to grasp. The use of fossil fuels remains the most economic way, in most cases, to produce energy, with the existing infrastructure to drill for and produce oil and mine coal making these sources relatively inexpensive. Meanwhile, building out the infrastructures for wind, solar and nuclear requires a massive investment.

In the end, the debate about how to prevent greenhouse gases has come down to money, and not as much about possible actions by governments or industry to save the planet.