We Never Had Paris

Was the Paris Climate Agreement Greenwashing on a Planetary Scale?

Abstract

These are dark days for climate action. Mainstream climate targets are under threat, political will appears to be dissipating rapidly, and the international process is in disarray. Many will attribute these failures to the power of fossil fuel interests and political forces hostile to environmental conservation. They may therefore see the priority as simply finding a way back to a conventional climate agenda that supports established global agreements. By contrast, I shall argue that the problem runs deeper. In particular, the crowning achievement of international climate policy, the Paris Agreement, is itself deeply flawed, such that climate failure was highly predictable and indeed actually predicted. The main lesson is that meaningful climate progress requires a new, more fundamental institutional response targeted at taking the ethical dimensions of the climate problem seriously and especially the threat of intergenerational tyranny.