Neither safe nor affordable: the 1.5 degree trap

The Paris paradigm just doesn't work

To write about Climate Change in this era is to write in the permanent shadow of the Paris Agreement.

Signed in 2015, Paris defined our climate paradigm. It sets out a framework for thinking about the issue so all-enveloping we struggle to even recognize it as such: it is the water, we are the fish. Paris defines both humanity’s agreed goals for the climate, and the scope of climate action. It sets the boundaries for the options agreed to be on the table.

On every level, it’s been unhelpful.

Its cornerstone is its carefully hedged language on goals: to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”

This phrasing has given way to a lot of confusion. People have not unreasonably concluded that Paris means a climate 1.5° hotter than in pre-industrial times is safe. But you’ll be hard pressed to find a climate scientist willing to say that.

A world 1.5°C hotter is a world with many, many more damaging and protracted summer heat waves than the one we grew up in. Beyond that one certainty, we’re dumped into a haze of probabilistic reasoning.

Arctic summer sea ice has a higher chance of hanging on at 1.5° than at 2°C global heating, but plenty of model runs yield zero summer arctic sea ice within a few decades even at 1.5°. And models tend to converge on acute weather weirdness as the very likely result: much bigger storms, far more extreme storms, droughts, all of it.

We’re walking through a minefield where some of the mines are visible, but others probably aren’t. Could 1.5° thaw enough permafrost to send methane levels spiking? Let’s roll that die! Could 1.5° be enough to permanently destabilize the West Antarctic Ice Sheet? Spin that roulette!

In terms of aggregate climate risk, 1.5° is much better than 2°C, granted, and much, much better than the 2.5-3.0°C range where we seem to be headed right now. But that does not mean 1.5° above pre-industrial mean average temperature is safe: 1.5° means living with CO₂ levels around twice the level they’ve been for most of the last million years. That’s not safe.

So the first problem with Paris is that it’s not nearly ambitious enough.

The second problem is that Paris is far too ambitious.

Because to get us to this unsafe space, it calls on countries to do the impossible: to radically re-imagine their energy systems in ways even the richest countries in the world can’t really afford.

Paris calls on nations to separately set aggressive decarbonization targets. Delivering on those targets there requires drastic and almost instant cuts, which could only be achieved at huge expense for which it is impossible to build stable political support.

In democracies, the pattern is relatively clear: governments soon realize the Paris targets require stiff new carbon taxes along with fat subsidies to renewable energy projects. But renewable energy is intermittent, meaning that strategy leaves you with a less reliable, more brittle and much more expensive grid. Global competitors who don’t make this blunder and keep their cheaper, more reliable fossil fuel-based grids soon walk away with the industrial base of the decarbonizers. Not surprisingly, their electorates rebel, usually as a result of sticker-shock at the pump, or in front of the electric bill, and vote them right out of office.

This, I think, is the most corrosive aspect of the Paris Agreement: it creates a poisonous wedge between the policy preferences of the elite and the electorate, a wedge that populists are only too happy to exploit to make their way into office.

Not content with failing at decarbonization, Paris renders decarbonizers politically toxic too.

This is the blind alley that the Paris paradigm has led us into: the terms of our climate debate are set by an international agreement that can’t work: an agreement that’s corroding our democracies in a hopeless attempt to bring about a future climate that wouldn’t even be safe in the first place.

The problem when you’re stuck inside the failing paradigm is that the critiques of that paradigm tend to take place from within the terms of the paradigm itself.

So, greens who grasp that even 1.5° would not result in a safe climate tend to respond by demanding ever more extreme decarbonization. Stuck up a blind alley, their only move is to step harder on the accelerator. This would only deepen the political toxicity of the decarbonization agenda. It’s no solution at all.

And conservatives who are often clear-eyed about the radical impossibility of rapid decarbonization, tend to respond by whistling past the graveyard about the risks of a more energetic atmosphere, softballing the dangers and hoping against hope that we’ll happen to land in one of the less chaotic futures the models hold out as possible. This is insanely irresponsible.

To see the way forward clearly, we need to step out of the Paris paradigm entirely so we can say two things loudly and clearly:

1. 1.5° is not safe!

2. Emissions-focused decarbonization is a failed strategy!

Once you say these two things together, you realize the entire Paris paradigm is useless.

We need something much better.

We need 1000X cheaper ways of drawing down carbon. We need 1000X quicker ways to lower the temperature.

We need to think outside the Paris box.

Urgently.