To casual observers, the breathless headlines and scenes of joyous relief from within the Le Bourget complex in Paris after days of talks might suggest that climate change has been solved.
They could be forgiven for concluding “job done” and perhaps switching off – just at the point when a wave of public interest is required to transform the rhetoric of the deal into reality.
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But in the climate-change hall of mirrors, a “historic” agreement is never quite what it seems. As many observers pointed out, the language of the accord was in places watered down so as to be almost meaningless. On several key issues, it was not legally binding.
Admittedly, the world’s governments broke new ground by uniting to endorse a deal to limit global warming to less than 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, and achieve zero net emissions of carbon dioxide by the end of the century. But even the giddiest UN negotiator wouldn’t claim that the problem has been “solved”. Public support will be vital to see this through.
Two weeks of technocratic deliberation are also unlikely to have won over those who are sceptical about climate change, or simply bored with hearing about it. In with the UK public, we found little awareness about the UN negotiating process.
Distant goals
The problem is that the agreement spells out distant goals, but not how they will be reached. The latter is what really matters in our everyday lives.
For example, it says nothing about how the production of fossil fuels – as opposed to the emissions they cause – will be curtailed. So despite the rush to declare the era of fossil fuels over, rumours of its demise may be premature. Zero net emissions could mean anything from abandoning such fuels altogether to relying on technologies for climate engineering that are currently untested, unproven and among the public.
People want to know if they can fly around the globe for pleasure in a zero-carbon world. Do the low-carbon benefits of nuclear power outweigh the risks of a radiation leak? In a carbon-constrained world, do we need to consume less, and in a different way?
This type of reflection on what a 2 °C world really means can lift climate change off the pages of the Paris accord and shift the issue from a scientific to a social reality. Part of the onus for making this happen falls on climate campaigners, who – for possibly the first time ever – can claim that history is on their side given the new global consensus.
Only if the UN agreement ends up shattering the prevailing public apathy about this issue will something really historic have been achieved.
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