What's not being said in the Paris Agreement

In its press release at the conclusion of the climate change conference in Paris, the government drew an extremely positive picture of a 'historic global climate deal… [in which] the whole world has signed up to play its part in halting climate change'. This description of affairs seems to justify continuing the UK's policy of drastic and costly decarbonisation efforts to 'mitigate' global warming.

But the government's accounts are so misleading that they completely undermine public consideration of the issues. The Paris Agreement not only fails to ground the mitigation policy, it ensures the policy will fail. Two principal points should be made.

First, the government has led the public to believe that an agreement to set a limit to global warming of 2 degrees Celsius or less has been reached. But article 2 of the draft agreement provides only that it 'aims to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change… by holding the increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius'. This does not set a concrete limit, but merely expresses an aspiration to set such a limit at some unspecified point in the future. The government's account, typically, is expressed in convoluted language that obscures this vital point.

What weight can be put on this aspiration? Neither 2 degrees Celsius nor any other specific target has ever been agreed at the United Nations (UN) climate change negotiations. The 2 degrees Celsius target was reported as early as 1996, when the EU Commission first put it forward at a meeting of the Council of the European Union to push UN negotiations, which, even then, were 'not advancing as needed to achieve [their] intended objective'.

Discussion of the target, principally by the UK and the EU and with the collaboration of the UN Climate Change secretariat, has since led to it being mentioned in various ways in subsequent UN negotiations, including in the Copenhagen Accord.

But it has never been agreed and it is not agreed now. The government was, therefore, obliged to make it clear to the public that an expression of mere aspiration is all that has been reached after more than a quarter-century of UN negotiations. To speak of the Paris Agreement as now driving us 'forward on our path to limiting global temperature rises to below [2 degrees Celsius]' without mentioning the history is deplorable.

Unbounded increase

Second, the Paris Agreement gives even greater force to what has - even more than failing to agree a target - completely undermined the mitigation policy since the agreement of the Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. It is not, despite general belief, that no emissions agreement was reached in the Convention or in its 1997 Kyoto Protocol. An agreement was reached, but, far from being an agreement to reduce global emissions, it was an agreement to allow their unbounded increase.

Under the 'common but differentiated responsibilities' strategy, without which the convention would never have been agreed by the newly industrialising countries such as China and India, those countries, classified as developing, were given explicit permission to give economic growth priority over emissions reduction. And, as the emissions of China itself are enough to prevent any global reductions (with India about ten years behind), this has more than sufficiently meant the mitigation policy was impossible from the outset. No emissions caps have ever been set on developing countries and their emissions have been the principal reason that global emissions have not reduced but have grown enormously during decades of UN negotiations.

In the Paris Agreement a crucial and damning distinction has been drawn between 'absolute' (i.e. actual) emissions reductions and other forms of reductions, principally in carbon intensity, which do not necessarily lead to absolute reductions and are consistent with growth in absolute emissions.

Article 4(4) of the Paris Agreement confines 'absolute emissions reduction targets' to the developed countries and distinguishes them from the 'mitigation efforts' the developing countries might undertake, which do not involve absolute reductions. This permits developing countries to refuse to make reductions and will be the legal basis of growth in China's and India's emissions.

Smoke and mirrors

It is, therefore, in one sense difficult for the government to give a clear account of the Paris Agreement. Pursuit of its domestic policy of decarbonisation will be completely fruitless because the government has long internationally agreed, and has now agreed again, that global emissions will grow. The unilateral reduction of the UK's 2 per cent of global emissions is simply senseless in light of China's and India's emissions trajectories. 

It is as if the UK was emptying a bath with a ladle while China was filling it with a bucket, with India standing behind getting its own bucket ready. Persistence in such a policy is possible only if the public does not understand the issues, and the government’s account of the Paris Agreement will do a great deal to ensure that this is the case.

David Campbell is a professor of law at Lancaster University @LancasterUni www.lancaster.ac.uk/law