Climate deal trumps nations
IN THE late 20th century, those who opposed globalisation were charged with swimming against an unstoppable tide, caricatured as “Stop the world, I wanna get off!” But in the 21st century, history is running with the antiglobalisers. World trade talks have gone nowhere, immigration controls have shot up the agenda, and two post-national European Union projects — the euro and Schengen — are under strain.
Figures as diverse as Donald Trump, Nicola Sturgeon and Marine Le Pen are all peddling one form of nationalism or another. Rumours of the death of the nation state, then, have proved exaggerated: globalisation is spinning into reverse.
Looking back on the future as it appeared in the 1990s — as a technocratic, transnational order — a democratic push-back was surely inevitable, in some senses even desirable. But when problems from the overuse of antibiotics to terrorism refuse to respect national borders, the retreat from the dream of global governance has some frightening consequences, especially in connection with climate change, the archetypal global problem. Saving the planet in a fracturing world is a daunting challenge indeed.
The COP21 talks in Paris surpassed expectations in rising to it, demonstrating how much can be achieved by determined diplomacy, even while working within the unbending red lines of jealously sovereign states. A formal treaty was precluded because it would hand a veto to the intransigent legislators of Capitol Hill, while also offending the sensibilities of Delhi and Beijing. Fortunately, it proved possible to work within the fudged alternative framework of a “legally binding instrument”.
Everyone offered up voluntary emission targets, and agreed to a five-yearly review of these. While the targets on the table are not yet adequate to avoid the disaster of more than 2°C of warming, the surprise inclusion of an aspiration to cap temperature rises at 1.5°C signals a shared understanding that the targets will have to be tightened at each successive review.
The destructive standoff between developing and developed countries that doomed Copenhagen six years ago has been transcended: the big developing economies, which now produce the bulk of emissions, are no longer pretending that they can delay doing anything until the rich world is perfectly green; at the same time the rich world is accepting that it will have to help shoulder the “loss and damage” costs inflicted by the long legacy of western pollution. London, December 13.