Agreement on global warming is ‘collective wishful thinking’

Naturally the BBC and others have been quick to trumpet the news that China and the US yesterday agreed to ratify last December’s Paris agreement on climate change. This “historic landmark”, it is being claimed, will be a major step towards saving the planet, by slashing the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide, thus supposedly preventing global temperatures from rising more than two degrees C above their preindustrial levels.

But like everything else we

As for President Obama, despite his wish to make “the fight against climate change” a centrepiece of his “legacy”, he has no power to ratify any international agreement. This could only be done with the agreement of two-thirds of the US Senate, which it is unlikely to give.

Another empty claim constantly made about the Paris agreement is that it was “legally binding”. Even if the agreement is eventually “ratified” by 55 countries representing 55 per cent of global emissions, as is required for it to take effect, this applies to only one part of what they signed up to in December. And this is merely that every signatory country should come up with a “nationally determined contribution” (NDC), giving its own version of just how much CO2 it expects to be emitting by 2030.

In fact, it is from these NDCs that we can see just how utterly meaningless the whole exercise has turned out to be. From the documents they all submitted in Paris, it is clear that almost all the world’s major emitters are planning to build enough new coal-fired power stations to ensure that their CO2 emissions will rocket. India alone, already the world’s thirdlargest emitter, is planning to build more than 400 coal-fired plants, and anticipates that by 2030 its emissions will actually be three times greater than they are today.