Yet it was only a little more than a year ago that climate scientists and environmentalists were viciously attacking the Paris agreement itself. The goals were too low to make a difference. There was nothing binding any of the signatories to live up to their promises, and no enforcement mechanism if they didn’t. It just kicked the can down the road.
James Hansen, the undisputed hero of the climate-change movement, called the Paris deal “a fraud really, a fake. … It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises.”
A joint letter signed by nearly a dozen top climate scientists said the agreement suffered “deadly flaws lying just beneath its veneer of success.” These scientists complained that the agreement could actually be counterproductive, since it gave the impression that global warming was being dealt with when in fact it wasn’t.
A study in the peer-reviewed journal Global Policy said that even if every country lived up to its CO2 emission reduction promises through 2030, the Paris deal would “likely reduce global temperature rise about 0.17°C in 2100.”
“Current climate policy promises will do little to stabilize the climate and their impact will be undetectable for many decades,” the study concluded.
Kevin Anderson, a climate-change professor at the University of Manchester told the London Independent that the Paris deal was “worse than inept” and that it “risks locking in failure.”
Friends of the Earth International labeled it “a sham of a deal” that will “fail to deliver.”
“Politicians say it is a fair and ambitious deal,” the group’s Dipti Bhatnagar said, “yet it is the complete opposite. People are being deceived.”
New Internationalist magazine said it was “a disaster for the world’s most vulnerable people. ”
Physicist Mark Buchanan, writing in Bloomberg View, called the Paris agreement an “abject failure.”
Nick Fillmore, in a piece for the left-wing Huffington Post, said that politicians had “convinced themselves and the compliant mainstream media that the accord all 195 countries signed was an amazing breakthrough document.”
Despite the “lofty language and idealistic goals,” it is, Fillmore said, “totally lacking in legally binding mechanisms that will hold governments to emission limits that will stop global warming from reaching devastatingly high levels.”
We could go on, but you get the picture. If the climate-change threat is real, the Paris deal really was a sham, for all the reasons these critics cited.
As such, the people who should be ashamed of themselves are those who continue to peddle myths about what the Paris deal would have achieved, not the guy who proved how flimsy the agreement actually was.
