The problem is, we haven’t even started. In the first decade of this century, emissions actually grew at twice the pace of the preceding three decades, fueled mostly by China and its vast appetite for coal. And even if every country, including the United States, were to deliver on the pledges made in Cancún, the world’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 would still be greater than in 2005.
This is not to discount the political boldness of the Obama administration’s proposal. The mining and energy companies that stand to lose money from the rules will almost certainly take them to court. They will be assailed mercilessly in Congress, where energy corporations have good friends and where a big chunk of the Republican Party does not believe in the science of climate change.
It is not to minimize the diplomatic obstacles to a deal on how to share the burden.
It is certainly not to minimize the technological challenge. The most efficient mitigation paths evaluated by the I.P.C.C. rely on the deployment of technologies that don’t really exist yet on the scale needed. For instance, in the absence of large-scale carbon capture and storage, the economic cost of staying below the 2-degree limit would more than double.
But the Earth doesn’t care about any of this.
What makes all this dithering so agonizing is that staying under the 2-degree ceiling would be surprisingly affordable, if the world started now to make reasonable emission cuts, while investing in developing the future technologies that could largely replace fossil fuels by the end of the century. According to the I.P.C.C report, the effort would slow the growth in the world’s annual consumption by no more than 0.14 percentage points, a tiny portion of the typical 3 to 4 percent annual rise in global output.
A Paltry Start in Curbing Global Warming
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