How the US could sabotage global climate goals

Governments face a deadline in early 2025 to update their national climate plans, 10 years after the adoption of the landmark Paris accord. Before that can happen, Americans will face a crucial decision on Election Day that will have consequences for the whole world.

If the US misses that deadline under a president who thinks this is no big deal, it could be a serious blow to global efforts to stop climate change. This isn’t about the US being the world’s savior. It’s about cleaning up after itself considering the planetary mess it’s made and continues to make.

What’s at stake? Only “debilitating impacts to people, planet and economies,” the latest United Nations report on greenhouse gas emissions released today tells us.

The US — like nearly every other country on Earth except for Iran, Libya, and Yemen — has ratified the Paris climate agreement, agreeing to work together to stop global warming from getting much worse. Action the US takes has an outsize impact on the world because the US has pumped out far more greenhouse gas emissions historically than any other country and remains the world’s second-biggest climate polluter today. And despite the historic investments the nation has made in clean energy under the Biden administration, the US is still the world’s leading oil and gas producer. We are a fossil fuel behemoth, a wolf in sheep’s clothing even when we agree to participate in international climate talks.

Global average temperatures are about 1.2 degrees Celsius higher today than they were before the Industrial Revolution. It might not sound like much, but wildfires, heatwaves, droughts, and storms have all grown much worse as a result.

Preventing more severe climate change isn’t altruism — it’s in our own self-interest. Hurricane Helene, which killed more than 220 people and reduced entire communities to ruins as it tore through the Southeast US this month, was fueled by soaring sea surface temperatures made 200 to 500 times more likely by greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.

The Paris accord sets a goal of stopping global warming at around 1.5C, and the UN report published today shows what it’s going to take to keep from blowing past that. It’s hard to read it without wincing. It’s actually titled, “No more hot air ... please!”

“If only current [national action plans] are implemented and no further ambition is shown in the new pledges, the best we could expect to achieve is catastrophic global warming,” the United Nations Environment Programme says. Specifically, it expects up to 2.6C of warming over the course of a century with business as usual.

Even so, the report says it’s still technically feasible to keep that 1.5-degree goal alive if countries take swift action. Global emissions would have to fall 42 percent by 2030 compared to 2019 levels. That’s no easy task considering the world is still moving in the opposite direction, with greenhouse gas emissions growing 1.3 percent year on year, according to the report.

Yet there are relatively simple ways to turn things around — solar and onshore wind energy are already cheaper power sources than fossil fuels in most of the world. The report also calls for increasing energy efficiency and electrifying homes and buildings.

The tougher question is whether policymakers and voters are on board with these solutions. The Republican platform says, “We will DRILL, BABY, DRILL.” Donald Trump says he would attempt to take the US out of the Paris agreement again, which he did during his previous presidency, before Joe Biden recommitted.

The last time Trump was elected president, I was at a UN climate conference in Marrakech, Morocco. “Today, many Africans have woken up horrified that we have a man in the White House who does not even accept that climate change is real – a president who has promised to back more fossil fuels and has promised to pull out of the Paris Agreement,” said Geoffrey Kamese, then a senior program officer of Friends of the Earth Africa, at a press briefing during the summit. “The people in this continent will pay with their lives for the results of the US elections.”

Members of the G20 encompassing many of the world’s largest economies, minus the African Union, pumped out 77 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in 2023, the new UN report says. Adding the African Union doubles the number of countries but only increases the share of emissions to 82 percent. That only goes to show that many of the nations most vulnerable to climate change are paying the price for a problem the world’s wealthiest countries are largely responsible for perpetuating.