Alberto Pezzali/Associated Press
Schoolchildren join a demonstration outside Parliament calling for action against climate change, September 20, 2019, in London.
In 2015, the Paris climate accord gave every country in the world the ability to set its own goals to combat the climate crisis. World leaders agreed to do their part toward stopping planet temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius—later updated to 1.5 degrees—above pre-industrial levels.
President Donald Trump was the first and only world leader to pull out of this international agreement, on June 1, 2017. His unilateral decision put one of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases outside of the global commitment. But the U.S. will not be the only country letting down the planet. Among the world’s largest and most advanced economies, not a single country will achieve the mission of the Paris Agreement to prevent more than 1.5 degrees of warming by the end of the century.
In other words, if you want to know why young people around the world have taken to the streets by the millions, desperate for a commensurate response to the climate emergency, it’s because only one government in the world (Morocco) has properly stepped up to this point. The independent tracking of current public policy in the U.S., Canada, Japan, and the European Union tells the tale.
The U.S. owes all of its sustained progress on emissions to the efforts of individual states, in particular California, which has enacted rigorous climate-conscious goals across the board. Increases in renewables and decommissioning of coal plants have also pushed baseline power emissions down significantly. But the Trump administration is determined to stall the progress, reversing many Environmental Protection Agency regulations and revoking California’s Clean Air Act waiver to set tailpipe emissions standards.
Targets set by President Barack Obama for 2030 could still be met, but only accidentally. The future of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions levels depends on who wins the tug-of-war between the states and the federal government, which has pulled overall emissions measurements in different directions. The U.S. has no goals currently set for 2030.
Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has always been an outspoken leader on climate crisis. He argued that the Paris Agreement wasn’t strict enough. In response to the U.S. leaving the deal, Trudeau expressed disappointment in a statement, vowing that “Canada is unwavering in our commitment to fight climate change and support clean economic growth. Canadians know we need to take decisive and collective action to tackle the many harsh realities of our changing climate.”
But the Liberal leader only committed in the Paris Agreement to the same goals set by the Conservative government before him, aiming to lower emissions levels to 7 percent to 14 percent below 1990 levels. This goal excludes offsets from land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF) and will result in total Canadian emissions within 511 MtCO2e (megatonnes of CO2 equivalent).
Canada’s current policies project the country will be emitting 630–763 MtCO2e in 2030, which is 5 percent to 27 percent above 1990 levels. Canada has been a diplomatic leader in projects like the Powering Past Coal Alliance, an organization working on the transition away from coal-sourced energy. But there is an increasing gap between Canadian rhetoric and concrete policy toward its Paris goals, according to a recent Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI) report.
Even if Canada reached its too-modest Paris goals, it would still result in temperature rises of nearly double the 1.5 degree threshold.
Japan is trending closely toward reaching its climate goals. But those goals are also far too modest. If every country set goals similar to Japan’s, the Earth would reach between 3 and 4 degrees of warming by the end of the 21st century.
Japan promised a goal of about an 18 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2030. But it excluded land use offsets in the base year, while planning to include those offsets in its 2030 results, which makes its “actual” commitment closer to a 15 percent reduction.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wrote in a Financial Times op-ed about the importance of prioritizing climate change, but his words have failed to translate into real policy. This June, the Japanese cabinet adopted its climate goals, but the nation has not defined how it will address its reliance on and investments in coal energy, projected to account for more than one-third of all Japanese energy production in 2030.
In 2017, the Japanese government also released several conflicting reports for how to achieve its climate goals. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry report said it would be difficult to achieve an 80 percent emissions reduction by 2050 domestically, while the Ministry of the Environment report stated that Japan could achieve the 80 percent reduction, if it introduced a nationwide carbon pricing scheme.
In 2030, with these current policies, Japan’s emission levels will be 1080–1140 MtCO2e/year, just 10 percent to 15 percent below 1990 levels, excluding its 37 MtCO2e/year land use offset.
The European Union submitted a joint goal for its 28 (U.K. included, for now) member states. It was an early adopter of joint climate agreements and renewable sources of energy, and it has raised its targets, which will be updated in the Paris Agreement next year. The EU’s current goal is “at least a 40 percent reduction” in emissions levels from 1990 levels by 2030. It’s currently on track for a 48 percent decrease and has already voted to legally increase the goal to 55 percent. But this also is not enough.
If every country adopted similar standards to the EU, the world would still be at risk for about 3 degrees of warming by the end of the 21st century. Individual countries in the EU have made strides in the right direction, earning them individually high rankings for their efforts.
The U.K. is the only G7 country to pass a law mandating the country be completely carbon neutral by 2050. It has also championed an aggressive coal-energy phase-out, but CCPI says more investment is necessary in renewable energy sources and better low-carbon transport.
France has lost two environment ministers in the past year: The latter resigned because of a corruption scandal and the former resigned out of principle on a radio show because he felt that President Emmanuel Macron’s government was ignoring the environment. The country has implemented a carbon tax and there is a coal phase-out plan in place, but the country’s emissions levels are still relatively high for its goals, according to CCPI.
Macron said, “I’ve changed,” explaining why he would suddenly be prioritizing environmental policy, in an interview with Konbini this August. But there have not been policy changes to reflect that.
To the north, Germany finds itself a leader in the EU and internationally, and this includes climate change diplomacy. Domestically, a high share of German energy comes from renewable sources—even compared to the EU as a whole—and emissions levels per capita are falling. But Germany still falls short of staying under its 2030 goals and projections for staying under 2 degrees of warming.
Germany lacks a carbon tax and other more aggressive policy initiatives that would better align its diplomacy with its results, according to CCPI. But improvements are being made slowly. For example, just this year legislation was proposed to phase out coal by 2038.
Neighboring Italy has managed to reduce energy use per capita over the years and has also implemented a coal phase-out plan by 2025. But the Repubblica has lacked implementation of its goals. Italy has joined the High Ambition Coalition statement in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, and CCPI says that “experts hope that this will lead to a more proactive approach in international climate negotiations.”
Following the U.N. Climate Action Summit, 80 countries have declared “intentions to update their NDC by 2020,” but not among that list are any of the G7 countries or the worst-performing polluters on the planet, like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S.
Despite extreme weather disasters, devastating water shortages, and an increase in deadly superstorms, the climate crisis has not inspired policy to match the problems the world is facing and the diplomatic efforts of the countries’ leaders. This has inspired the social unrest around the globe, especially among young people.
Although Trump was the only world leader to pull out of the deal, all of the leaders of the world’s largest and most advanced economies are failing. The countries that have benefited most from emitting greenhouse gases brought the world together to combat this shared problem, but it should also be on them to make the largest concessions, especially when they expect credit for their green diplomatic initiatives.
