Global Stumbling: UN Reports Nation After Nation Floundering Well Short Of Paris Carbon Goals
On Tuesday, a new UN report warned that the world is farther than it was last year from meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change. More than half of the planet’s richest countries—including Canada, Australia, South Korea, the United States, and the nations of the European Union—are not cutting their carbon pollution as fast as they promised under that treaty, it says.
If humanity does not change course, then Earth could warm by roughly 6 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, the report suggests. This is enough warming to set off some of the most feared consequences of climate change, including deadly heat waves, ravaging wildfires, widespread plant and animal extinctions, and potentially many feet of runaway sea-level rise.
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In fact, a global rightward shift on climate change seems to be occurring. In the United States, Trump has undone several major programs meant to limit carbon pollution. In Australia, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull failed to pass an energy-reform bill that included modest climate goals, and was promptly ousted by his own party for proposing it. In Brazil, the far-right president-elect, Jair Bolsonaro, has promised to strip the Amazon rainforest of its legal protections, possibly clearing the way for logging of such scale as to virtually ensure dangerous climate change.
Even in France, the birthplace of the climate treaty, rioters have taken to the streets this week to protest President Emmanuel Macron’s new climate-friendly tax on gasoline and diesel. France, Brazil, Australia, and the United States are all members of the G20, an organization of the world’s 20 largest economies or central banks. Drost, the UN officer who helped lead the new report, said the G20 countries are primarily responsible for the growing failure to meet Paris. Taken together, they emit about 80 percent of worldwide carbon pollution every year.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/how-hot-will-climate-change-make-earth/576700/