Will Glasgow Be the Climate Breakthrough We Need?

The jawboning has been going on for nearly a third of a century.

It started back in 1992. Delegates from around the world — including a hesitant American president, George H.W. Bush — met in Rio de Janeiro for an “Earth Summit,” earnestly promising to stop wrecking the planet. A new global treaty was hastily drawn up and plastered with a grand title: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

It was bold, promising to stabilize greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous global warming. And it was vague, requiring countries to do close to nothing, except to keep meeting and jawboning. The United States Senate ratified it that same year without much hesitation.

What has happened to emissions since the nations of the world promised to stabilize them? They have gone up, by more than 60 percent. After a dip in 2020 caused by the pandemic, they have resumed their inexorable rise. Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have already reached alarming levels, and in that sense, the treaty has failed. Global temperatures are rising, too, as basic scientific theory predicted they would.

Catastrophic climate change is upon us — savage heat waves, destructive fires, epic rainstorms — and the situation is going to get much worse. So you would not have to be too much of a cynic to cast a wary eye upon the meeting that began Sunday in Scotland.

This two-week climate gathering will mark the 26th time delegates from around the world have met to discuss climate change, and the climate crisis has kept getting worse.

And yet, the Glasgow meeting really is important. If it ends in a diplomatic stalemate, that could do a lot of damage. We have finally started to achieve some international momentum to cut emissions. A perceived failure in Scotland could easily kill that spirit and set the world back by years. A successful negotiation, on the other hand, could add to the momentum, drawing us closer to the day when global emissions peak and finally begin to fall.

To understand what’s on the agenda in Glasgow, let’s go back in time a bit.

The first attempt to give the climate treaty some real teeth was called the Kyoto Protocol, which took effect in 2008. It was an effort to impose targets and timetables on the richer countries, most of which had high emissions. Developing countries were exempted, including China, even though its emissions had already begun to rise steeply. The United States, the world’s largest emitter historically and the largest at the time of the protocol, refused to adopt it, partly for fear of disabling American industry in its competition with China. (As it turned out, the emissions cuts by countries that ratified Kyoto were eventually swamped by the increase in emissions in the developing world.)

Negotiators tried again in 2009 in Copenhagen. But a new American administration, under Barack Obama, failed to pull the countries of the world into common cause.

That failure set the stage for a rebound. In 2010, negotiators abandoned the effort to impose targets and timetables on reluctant countries. Instead, they said: Come and tell us what you can do.

This seemingly weaker approach had a surprising result: It produced greater global ambition. With the pressure of mandatory targets lifted, nearly every country made commitments to tackle the problem. Far better prepared this time, the Obama administration negotiated directly with China, and both countries offered bold pledges to reduce emissions.

This approach culminated in late 2015 with the Paris Climate Agreement, gaveled into existence in a huge plywood conference hall outside Paris, where cheers rang out and Champagne flowed. Climate change was now seen as a problem every country had a responsibility to tackle.

Even so, the national pledges made at Paris were wholly inadequate. If met, they would still have allowed global warming to rise to dangerous levels. Recognizing this, the delegates in Paris adopted a “ratchet” mechanism, requiring countries to show up every five years and make new, bolder pledges. That was supposed to happen in 2020, but was delayed a year by the pandemic. So it is in Glasgow this year that the first new pledges come due.

Britain, which is hosting the conference, is cajoling the world’s countries to go big. Many of them say that they will cut their emissions close to zero by 2050 or 2060, and the bold ones are setting 2030 targets. That is important, because tough 2030 targets make procrastination harder; they demand action from the politicians who are now in office.

Emissions in the United States have already fallen about 20 percent from their peak in 2005. Much of that effort was carried out by state and local governments and by industry, the real workhorses on this issue in America. President Biden has pledged to cut national emissions in half by 2030, compared with 2005 levels, and largely eliminate them by 2050. But he has had trouble muscling his plans through Congress and arrived in Glasgow nearly empty-handed.

Given the long and troubled track record of these international negotiations, have they had any real value? The best way to view the history is to say that nearly a quarter-century of failure has been followed by six years of moderate success.

The world’s international institutions and global treaties are inherently weak, and the climate agreement is among our weakest treaties. And yet it offers, in these regular meetings, a stage on which the climate drama can play out.

Leaders go to these conferences and make pledges because they are embarrassed not to. Yes, the pledges are still too weak, countries are not on track to meet even their weak pledges, and the world is, collectively, a long way from where it needs to be.

Emissions are not the only issue. Rich countries promised $100 billion a year in aid for poor countries to cope with the climate emergency, and they have failed to deliver the full sum. The United States is among the biggest deadbeats. Expect a lot of fireworks on this issue. It is one of several that could cause the conference to dissolve in recrimination and failure.

As delegates haggle, it is in the work on the ground where real hope is to be found. If emissions can fall in dozens of countries, as they have, they can eventually fall in all countries. If Norway can get to a point where 60 percent of new cars sold are electric, so can every nation. If California can order that every new house built have solar panels on the roof, so can every American state.

So let the jawboning begin. Let the world leaders make their commitments, and then return home to tackle the real work.

Justin Gillis, a former environmental writer for The Times, is a fellow at Harvard’s Center for the Environment.

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