Why is climate action stagnating instead of intensifying as the Earth warms?

Ten years after the Paris Agreement, we should see a massive scale-up of climate action. Instead, the last four years have seen virtually no progress – including at the last COP summit, which took no significant steps to phase out fossil fuels or end deforestation. What is happening?

I don’t know the answer. But I’m starting to worry that instead of responding more rationally as the world warms and the impacts become more severe, our responses are becoming more and more irrational. If so, climate impacts will be much worse than they would otherwise be, and the prospect of a decline of our global civilization seems more plausible than I have long thought.

Let’s start by going back to the Paris Agreement of 2015. The very idea of ​​an international climate agreement under which each country would set its own targets to limit greenhouse gas emissions seemed ridiculous to me. Just like the idea of ​​setting an “ambitious” objective of 1.5°C, very far from what the countries planned to do. Proponents claimed that this problem would be solved by a “ratchet mechanism,” whereby countries would gradually increase their targets.

I wasn’t convinced. I came back from Paris considering it a gigantic exercise in greenwashing. I expected this to have little immediate impact, but as the effects of warming became more evident, the action would begin to intensify. In other words, reason would ultimately prevail.

So far, the opposite has happened. Before Paris, in October 2015, the Climate Action Tracker project estimated that the world was heading towards warming of around 3.6°C by 2100, based on current policies and actions. In 2021, this estimate was revised downward to around 2.6°C. This is a huge improvement – ​​it looked like Paris was working.

But the latest Climate Action Tracker report, ahead of the COP30 summit, makes grim reading. For the fourth year in a row, there has been “little or no measurable progress.” “Global progress has stalled,” the report says. “Even as a handful of countries make real progress, their efforts are offset by others delaying or reversing their climate policies. »

In fact, it is astonishing that 95 percent of countries missed this year’s deadline to update their targets under this ratchet mechanism.

Yes, renewable energy production is growing much faster than expected. But this is offset by the huge sums invested in fossil fuels. Cheap solar power alone is not going to save us. On the one hand, negative feedback effects are felt: the more solar energy there is, the less profitable it is to install more. On the other hand, generating green electricity is the easy part – we’re not making enough progress in difficult areas, like agriculture, aviation and steelmaking.

Moreover, the problem is not just the failure to reduce emissions. We also don’t prepare ourselves for what’s coming. We continue to build cities on declining land, beside a rising sea. “Progress on adaptation is either too slow, stalled, or moving in the wrong direction,” says an April report from the UK Committee on Climate Change – and the situation is similar elsewhere.

The big question is why climate action is stagnating instead of intensifying further. In some countries, this is obviously due to the election of politicians who do not consider climate change a priority or who shamelessly deny it, as evidenced by the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.

However, even governments that consider climate a priority are doing less, apparently on the grounds that there are more pressing problems to solve, such as the cost of living crisis. Yet the cost of living crisis is partly a climate crisis, with extreme weather helping to drive up food prices. As warming continues, the impact on food and the economy as a whole will only get worse.

Will we get to the point where governments say they cannot act on climate change because of the costs of flooding major cities with rising seas? Will people’s fears about the state of the world cause them to continue voting for climate deniers, when pollsters tell us that most people in the world want more climate action?

The idea that this growing evidence will persuade leaders to come to their senses seems increasingly naive. We are, after all, in a strange multiverse where the US Centers for Disease Control promotes anti-vax nonsense even as the country is on the verge of losing its measles-free status, and where some politicians propagate the idea that hurricanes are caused by weather manipulation.

After years of record heat, it has never been more clear that climate change is real and truly serious. But maybe that’s the problem. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum has argued that fear is an extremely negative force that causes people to abandon rationality and focus on their immediate well-being rather than long-term good. And there is evidence that environmental stresses cause people to behave irrationally.

People tend to jump straight from “things are bad” to “we’re all doomed.” No, we are not doomed. But the longer reason takes to prevail, the worse the result will be. Maybe what we’re seeing is just an incident related to the fallout from the pandemic and Russia’s war against Ukraine – or maybe there’s something more worrying going on.