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This Former UN Climate Chief Is Concerned Paris Agreement Won't Go Far Enough

As negotiators from nearly 200 nations seek to hammer out a global agreement on climate change, Yvo de Boer worries that it may not be enough to boost clean energy investment and hold off dangerous levels of warming.
Photo by Jeon Heon-Kyun/EPA

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After 11 days of intense negotiations, delegates from 196 nations have agreed on a draft text that could result in a post-2020 agreement on climate change.

But though the agreement, which must be signed off on by every country in the world by Friday, lays the foundation for a low-carbon economy, a former high-level leader of the process thinks it will be "extremely difficult" to grow that economy fast enough to avoid dangerous levels of atmospheric warming.

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"I'm concerned that the signal that will come from this conference will not be strong enough to drive real fundamental change in society," said Yvo de Boer, who was Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change from 2006 to 2010.

By many accounts the negotiation process is going faster and smoother than at the last major round of climate talks in Copenhagen. During the second week of those 2009 negotiations, which failed to produce a meaningful agreement, the draft text was 300 pages long when environment ministers took over from negotiators. The text in Paris, by contrast, is at the moment a relatively breezy 29 pages.

"Today there is a much stronger willingness by countries to act on climate change," de Boer explained. "Around the negotiations you have hundreds if not thousands of organizations that aren't waiting but are going ahead and acting on climate change anyway," de Boer said.

'This is, I believe, a very absurd situation.'

That's resulted in some major steps at Paris towards a truly low carbon economy. On the opening day, India's Prime Minister Narenda Modi launched an alliance of 120 countries pushing to deploy solar energy across the world. India also joined China, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil and 15 other nations in promising to double their investments in clean energy research and development over five years.

A group of 28 billionaires, led by Bill Gates, pledged to invest in risky low-carbon technologies. African nations set a clean energy target of 300 gigawatts by 2030, over double the continent's current energy production. A coalition of sub-national governments estimated it could cut more emissions over 15 years than China's current output. And Bank of England governor Mark Carney led the creation of a global task force measuring the economic risks posed by climate change to financial institutions.

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"This is all very significant because at the moment if you have a company and it's listed on the stock exchange the only thing that people use to judge the value of your company is how much cash you return to shareholders," de Boer said. "The damage you're doing to the environment is not calculated into the value of your company."

Related: Meet the 20-Somethings Who Have Been Tracking the Paris Climate Talks in a Google Doc

The former UN leader now heads a group called the Global Green Growth Institute, which on Monday launched a partnership with development banks and regional UN commissions to speed up financing for low-carbon projects. But none of it changes the fact that current carbon cuts promised by the world's nations only get us at best to 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming — much higher than the two degrees deemed by scientists and diplomats to be a threshold for avoiding dangerous changes to the climate. "The level of ambition is not what it should be," he said.

A big reason why is that countries are trying to build a low-carbon economy while also spending billions — $490 billion in 2014 alone — to subsidize the development of oil, coal, and gas.

"This is, I believe, a very absurd situation," International Energy Agency Executive Director Fatih Birol argued in Paris. "It is not a very consistent approach." He compared the competition between clean energy and fossil fuels to a rigged 100-meter sprint. "Fossil fuels are starting the race from 50 meters and renewables are starting from the start, so it's an unfair competition," Birol said.

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Some countries actively oppose efforts to make the competition fairer. Major oil-exporting nations like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, for instance, are fighting in the Paris negotiations to weaken any language aimed at a full-scale "decarbonization" of the world's energy supply by 2050, Martin Kaiser, head of the international climate politics division at Greenpeace, said.

Such countries instead want to delay a complete shift to renewable energy until the end of the century, he said, a timeline far too long to spur immediate investments in the low-carbon economy. Even within the EU, which has historically led global climate action, countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic "still have a problem saying goodbye to coal," said Kaiser.

Related: Now Here's Some Good News: Global Warming Emissions Could Actually Be in Decline

It's generally agreed in Paris that the current negotiations will be the start of a long-term process for dealing with climate change, and not just result in a one-off deal.

The US delegation is leading the push for an agreement compelling countries to meet every five years — each time with more ambitious carbon cuts. But de Boer isn't sure that will result in changes to our energy system fast enough to ensure only two degrees of warming.

"By the time countries meet again in five years time to increase the level of ambition we will have lost to some extent a five year opportunity," he said.

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Yet he hasn't totally given up hope. Some was provided this week by a study showing that global carbon emissions are likely to decline 0.6 percent this year, after growing 2.4 percent for the last decade.

"I'm optimistic," de Boer said. "I think its better to recognize the level of commitment we can get at this time … and to build on from there."

Follow Geoff Dembicki on Twitter: @GeoffDembicki

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