Should we give up on climate action now that the Paris goal can’t be met? The answer is still ‘no’

A “pragmatic way forward" for the energy transition is to conclude, in essence, that it’s not happening, according to an April essay by energy historian Daniel Yergin and others. Current ambitions are “unrealistic and therefore unworkable," a think-tank set up by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair argued. In the more pungent words of President Donald Trump, climate action is a “con job," and should be abandoned.

This contrarian chorus is so noisy and persistent that it’s easy to miss how dramatically wrong it is—especially when some ambitions, like the promise to keep warming below 1.5° Celsius, are being missed. In truth, however, evidence of nearly three decades of climate diplomacy shows that when we set ourselves an objective, more often than not we will hit it. That should stiffen the spines of the politicians gathered at the CoP-30 climate meeting in the Brazilian city of Belém.

Take the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement between industrialized nations, promising to cut their emissions by 5% below their levels in 1990. Now remembered as an ignominious failure, it was actually a resounding success, delivering a far deeper 22.6% cut. The problem wasn’t that the goal was missed. Emissions did indeed increase over the 2000s, but that was due to countries that weren’t party to the protocol, not the ones that were.

Or consider the EU’s first pledge under the 2015 Paris Agreement to cut emissions in 2030 to 40% below levels in 1990. Plenty scoffed at the time. The promises “will fail to accomplish anything substantial to rein in climate change," Bjorn Lomborg, a long-time opponent of action, wrote in the Wall Street Journal. Even more credible sources had their doubts. The European Environment Agency in 2017 projected the bloc would miss the goal and that the pace of emission reductions would soon slow.

In fact, greenhouse pollution last year was already 37% below 1990, and on current trends the EU may achieve a 54% cut, almost sufficient to hit a stricter target passed in 2020. These self-styled pragmatists now mocking Brussels’ most recent ambition to deepen reductions to 90% by 2040 should face up to a long history of promises that have been kept, not broken.

It’s the same with China’s promise in 2020 to install 1,200 gigawatts of wind and solar power by 2030. By September-end, it had already surpassed that figure, with more than 1,700 gigawatts connected. This year, few have even bothered to question the 3,600 gigawatts by 2035 goal President Xi Jinping announced in September.

In instance after instance, sober realists have been proven wrong, while the wildest hopes of campaigners have been exceeded. That even applies to the detailed pictures of the future laid out by the International Energy Agency (IEA). The amount of renewable electricity the world will generate this year will be about 9% more than what the IEA in 2018 reckoned we’d need to keep global warming below 2° Celsius.

If you had followed the IEA’s Current Policies scenario (a fossil fuel-favouring model reintroduced this year after lobbying by the Trump administration) you’d have overestimated 2025’s level of oil demand by about 4.2 million barrels a day—equivalent to the output of Iraq, the OPEC cartel’s second-biggest producer. The same scenario underestimated this year’s renewable production by 2,600 terawatt-hours, similar to all the electricity generated in the EU.

The problem isn’t that we fail to hit the objectives we set for ourselves. It’s that the drumbeat of bad-faith nihilism encourages us to forget the progress we have already made and lower our ambitions for the future. Emissions keep inching up not because of nations that fail to uphold their promises on climate action, but because of nations that aren’t making adequate promises at all—Xi’s failure to set a number on reducing China’s coal consumption, for instance, or Trump’s recent wrecking of US climate measures.

Five years ago, the most ambitious emission-reduction plans laid out by governments would have resulted in about 3° Celsius of global warming by the end of the century. We’re now staring 2.3° Celsius of warming—still-disastrous, but moving closer to well below 2° where we need to be. The 2015 Paris Agreement, dismissed at the time as a ‘fraud’ and ‘dangerous incrementalism,’ is actually working.

As solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and rechargeable batteries remake power systems, our energy transition is on the brink of victory. Ignore doomsayers who can’t see it. ©Bloomberg

The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy.