Comments on Stephen Gardiner’s “We Never Had Paris:Was the Paris Climate Agreement Greenwashing on a Planetary Scale?

Abstract

The adoption of the Paris Agreement (PA) in December 2015 was widely celebrated as a milestone in international climate policy, affirming the longstanding goal of limiting climate warming to 2 degrees Celsius, and promising further efforts to keep warming below 1.5C. Ten years hence, after the hottest decade on record (NASA n.d.) and a continued upward trend in CO2 emissions, these goals seem increasingly difficult to reach. Stephen Gardiner argues that these challenges were predictable: the Paris Agreement – like the Kyoto Protocol before it – falls prey to a number of moral problems associated with the “perfect moral storm” of climate change. Successfully weathering the storm requires a major political shift and a new global commitment to future generations that can disrupt the cycle of intergenerational buck passing Gardiner so aptly describes. To achieve this shift, I argue, may require addressing the moral psychology of intergenerational buck passing and the moral ambivalence that may encumber even those deeply concerned about climate change.