At the end of COP 21: Looking at the scoreboard, looking forward

According to the Climate Interactive Scoreboard, the proposed action in the December 12, 2015 draft of the climate agreement would result in an expected 3.5˚C increase in global temperature, despite rhetoric pushing for limiting the temperature increase to 2˚C and a goal of 1.5˚C. As previously established, a temperature increase of over 2˚C will result in many catastrophic consequences, notably the disappearance of small island states among other crises. Truth be told, I entered this period of Paris negotiations quite skeptical. I thought that the Finance and the Loss and Damage articles, in particular, would present a sufficiently high barrier to reaching agreement on an entire text. And yet, we have one today. According to Paris Agreement News, the number of brackets in the text has been reduced from 1609 on November 10 to zero today. We need only for the document to be approved in the plenary meeting.

However historic an agreement of this magnitude will be, the fact remains that the expected 3.5˚C temperature increase under this agreement leaves the globe in risky and uncharted territory.

Even so, my hope was renewed during a panel at MIT EAPS on the COP21 negotiations. During the talk, Jessika Trancik presented projections for decreases in the costs for solar and wind that we can expect due to increases in deployment of these technologies in accordance with stated INDC’s. The research her group has done for the report “Technology improvement and emissions reductions as mutually reinforcing efforts” anticipates that reductions in costs of solar and wind result in “a negative cost of carbon abatement relative to coal” by 2030 (the deadline for many countries’ nearest term INDC goal). As the costs of carbon abatement go down and we reframe the climate change negotiations as a chance for “opportunity-building rather than burden-sharing,” the global political will for ratcheting up of carbon reduction goals in the future becomes more likely. And ratcheting up of abatement is exactly what we need to come closer to the +2˚C world.

As Trancik and her team point out, financing for developing countries to deploy renewable technologies and the issue of intermittency must also be addressed. In the case of intermittency, at least, we can assume that some of the trends leading to the reduced cost of renewables will also apply to technologies like energy storage. Development of these technologies will, in turn, increase the positive reinforcement of renewable technology development.

Here’s to the optimistic view that trends in technology and ratcheting of carbon abatement policies will occur quickly enough to keep the small island nations above sea level.