What have we achieved since the Paris agreement?

From The Climate Council

In 2015, the Paris Agreement made history. 195 countries came together at the world’s biggest summit on climate action (also known as COP21) and agreed to the world’s first binding international agreement to limit climate change and adapt to its impacts.

Importantly, countries agreed to work together to hold ‘the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels’ and pursue efforts ‘to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.’

Every national government must now establish a clear plan to reach net zero emissions with regularly updated targets to cut climate pollution.

As governments converge once more at the United Nations Climate Conference, this time, COP30 in Belém, Brazil, some are asking what have we achieved to combat climate change?

The past three years have been the hottest on record, climate disasters have slammed every continent this year and climate pollution from coal, oil and gas continues to rise.

10 years after Paris, it’s worth taking stock of where we are at, how much the world has achieved, and the task ahead.

In 2023, the international community agreed to switch away from fossil fuels, finally formally acknowledging the contribution of coal, oil and gas to global warming.

This agreement was labelled the ‘beginning of the end’ for fossil fuels globally. While we still have a long way to go, the global energy mix is shifting away from coal, oil and gas:

• Global emissions are slowing: the latest data shows that we are burning more fossil fuels than ever and emissions continue to climb, but the rate of growth has dropped from 2% per year to 0.6% per year.
• The world’s biggest polluter’s emissions have peaked: China’s emissions are already peaking, five years ahead of previous projections.
• Countries are phasing out coal: this year, Ireland became the eighth country to phase out coal generation since the Paris Agreement was signed. Many more have committed to becoming coal-free over the coming years, including nearly the entire European Union.
• More countries are committing to get off coal, oil and gas: Pacific Island Nations are leading a diplomatic campaign for a global phase out of coal, oil and gas, calling for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. In addition, 62 countries led by the UK and Canada have pledged to phase out unabated coal generation completely through the Powering Past Coal Alliance.

The global energy transformation is gathering speed: low-emissions energy sources (including wind, solar, hydropower and nuclear) now generate more than 40% of the world’s electricity, compared to 33% in 2015.

Clean energy is smashing records:

• 2025 saw a significant milestone: in the first six months of 2025 the world generated more power from solar and wind than from coal.
• Record-breaking renewable rollout: Global renewable electricity generation is expected to nearly double by 2030 – enough new renewable generation to meet the combined power demand of China and the US.
• Solar is booming: ​​It took eight years for the world’s solar capacity to go from 100 TWh to 1,000 TWh, then just three years to double to 2,000 TWh. Solar prices have dropped 66% in the past decade, becoming the cheapest form of power in history.
• Investment in clean energy has increased 10x: Investment in clean energy has grown from around US$230 billion in 2013, to $2.2 trillion in 2025 (equivalent to AU $3.4 trillion – twice as much as global investment in coal, oil and gas).
• China: The world’s biggest polluter, China, is transforming into a clean energy juggernaut.
• Cleaning up transport: One in five cars sold worldwide is now electric, compared to just 1% in 2015.

Read more in our report Power Shift: The US, China and the Race to Net Zero

 

When the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015 no countries had formal net zero targets. Now,  83% of the global economy has a net zero target. Analysis shows that climate targets are becoming more robust over time, covering more sectors and gases. The majority of countries also have targets to increase renewable generation.

 

The Paris Agreement aims to reach peak global greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, reaching net zero by the second half of this century. If all countries follow through on their commitments, global emissions are expected to peak by 2030. However, to limit global heating to 1.5°C without overshoot, global climate pollution needed to peak this year, at the latest, and fall by 43% on 2019 levels by 2030.
But global temperature is rising, and so are the impacts

We are already living in a hotter and more dangerous world, fuelled by climate pollution from coal, oil and gas. Today we are at 1.3°C of global warming, and the past three years have been the hottest on record.

In 2015, the world was on a catastrophic path to an average global temperature increase of 4°C by the end of this century. Now, according to the latest official data, we are tracking towards 2.3 – 2.5°C, if countries reach their targets.

This is a more dangerous future, and still falls far short of what is needed. Global warming of 1.5°C is considered the upper limit of what vulnerable communities, coral reefs, and many ecosystems can withstand. Science is clear that crossing the 1.5°C threshold increases the risk of triggering irreversible and cascading climate impacts. Transformative action, delivered urgently, is needed to limit how much and for how long we overshoot this threshold, and to bring temperatures back down to safer levels.

The only way to do so is by cutting pollution from coal, oil and gas further and faster than we are today, in all the places we can do so.

With almost half the world’s population already vulnerable to the effects of climate change, global work to adapt, build resilience and deal with loss and damage caused by climate-driven disasters is critical. The Paris Agreement set a Global Goal on Adaptation to increase countries’ efforts to prepare for and manage the impacts of climate disasters. In 2023 countries agreed to an adaptation framework, and a key focus of COP30 in Belém is to establish indicators to measure this progress.

The international community has also established a new Loss and Damage fund, and as of June this year, 27 countries had pledged more than AU$1.2 billion. This represents a small fraction of the estimated economic costs of climate change-induced loss and damage in developing countries of up to $AU800 billion in 2030, rising to up to 2.6 trillion by 2050.

So, we have achieved quite a lot, but nowhere near enough.  We need to do more, much more.

NO2 pollution plummets in Paris

 From Brent Toderian

Air pollution has dropped significantly in #Paris in the last 15 years. Mayor @annehidalgo.bsky.social’s leadership has traded car space for green space, safe bike space, kid space.. and traded pollution for people.

Good trade.

 

1.5 degrees to be reached 11 years sooner

 From a toot by Professor Christopher May

The shortcomings of the COP series of meetings (and the failure of #ParisAgreement) have contributed to a shortening of the time by which we will reach 1.5c eleven years earlier.

So once we all got behind the Paris Agreements agenda on the #climatecrisis, things actually got worse.

I've said this before, but in the future (as our descendants grapple with #climatechange & its social disruption), our children's children will curse our political leaders for their lack of leadership & action(s)

The trend rate of increase in global prices has accelerated.
As it happens, we have already reached 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures,
if only temporarily (?)

And still we do too little to avert catastrophe.

Syriasly? US now Alone in Snubbing Paris (with one Other Failed State)

This headline amused me.

It comes from Climate Denial Crock of the Week.

And then there were two. 

This week, Nicaragua, one of the few holdouts from the Paris climate accords, did an about-face and said it will sign the agreement. 

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega announced that the Central American nation of 6 million people ― about the size of Maryland ― would sign the landmark pact voluntarily committing nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to El Nuevo Diario, one of the nation’s major newspapers. 

After President Obama, who orchestrated the pact bringing together more than 190 nations, only two nations had yet to sign the agreement in April of this year. 

One was Syria, which was and still is in the middle of a bloody civil war. The other was Nicaragua, which attended 2015 talks but refused to sign the accord. 

President Trump announced his intent to make the United States the third nonparticipant in the pact because of, as he said in a speech in June, “the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country.”

[Read more here]

Source

Air pollution inside cars

Air pollution inside cars is 9 to 12 times as bad as it is outside cars.  And it's bad enough there.

Source

Children are at risk of dangerous levels of air pollution in cars because exposure to toxic air is often far higher inside than outside vehicles, a former government chief scientific adviser has warned. 

Prof Sir David King, writing for the Guardian, says walking or cycling to school would be much better for children’s health. The warning comes as the UK government faces a third legal defeat for failing to tackle the country’s illegal levels of air pollution. Air pollution is known to damage children’s developing lungs but recent research also indicates it harms children’s ability to learn at school and may damage their DNA. 

“Children sitting in the backseat of vehicles are likely to be exposed to dangerous levels [of air pollution],” said King. “You may be driving a cleaner vehicle but your children are sitting in a box collecting toxic gases from all the vehicles around you.” 

“The best thing for all our health is to leave our cars behind,” said King, who now advises the British Lung Foundation. “It’s been shown that the health benefits of walking and cycling far outweigh the costs of breathing in pollution. If more drivers knew the damage they could be doing to their children, I think they’d think twice about getting in the car.” 

A range of experiments, some as far back as 2001, have shown that drivers inside vehicles are exposed to far higher levels of air pollution than those walking or cycling along the same urban routes. 

Prof Stephen Holgate, an asthma expert at Southampton University and chair of the Royal College of Physicians working party on air pollution, said there was enough evidence to tell parents that walking and cycling exposes their children to less air pollution than driving. 

“It is nine to 12 times higher inside the car than outside,” he said. “Children are in the back of the car and often the car has the fans on, just sucking the fresh exhaust coming out of the car or lorry in front of them straight into the back of the car.”

[Read more here]

I have to say I didn't know this.  

I'm all in favour of more walking and cycling.  But even if you walk or cycle you are still exposed to nitrogen dioxide (not to be confused with nitrous oxide, N2O) and various extremely unhealthy particulates.  Plus if you cycle you have a much higher risk of accident than if you are driving a car (that's why I stopped cycling--the risks were just too high)  And sometimes you simply have to use your car, especially in cities where public transport is bad.  Whatever work-arounds we try, the truth is that petrol(gasoline)/diesel cars, lorries, and busses don't just emit carbon dioxide, they emit other toxic muck, which kills people.  

The solution is obvious: electric vehicles (EVs).  But it's a collective solution, because it's not enough for you to replace your ICE car with an EV, if everybody else continues to use their filthy petrol or diesel cars and lorries.  Yes, at the margin we can make a small difference.  But we're still breathing in everybody else's toxic waste and getting sick because of it.  We have to act as a society to get rid of ICE vehicles, by regulation and tax incentives.  The problem is that the Right equates "collective" with "socialist", and refuses to act.  

The good news (the topic for my next post) is that the cost of electric cars is falling so fast that within 5 years they will be cheaper than ICEs.  So even if the Right drags their feet, the car fleet will start to get cleaner.  But it will still take time: average car life is around 10 or 11 years, so even when 100% of new car sales is made up by EVs, it will take a decade after that point for the whole car fleet to be pollution free, unless we offer owners of worn-out old ICEs an incentive to swap their cars for EVs.  For me, and for everybody's health, a 100% EV fleet can't come soon enough.

Paris Air Pollution

It's easy to worry about the rise of Trump and his Troglodytes.  These antediluvian backward-looking idiots want to pull the US out of the Paris accord and reverse US moves towards combating climate change.  And make no mistake, they will have some effect.  Yet they can't and won't stop the revolution.  It's simple: in electricity generation, renewables are cheaper than coal, and as cheap as gas.  In transport, EVs (electric vehicles) are already cheaper to run than petrol- or diesel-driven cars, and soon -- by end 2017 -- will have similar sticker prices.  Meanwhile, outside the demented Right in the US (and Australia), the reality of global warming is crystal clear.  And so is the obviousness of other kinds of pollution created by particulate emissions from diesel and petrol cars.  This episode of toxic air pollution in Paris shows why the switch to EVs won't stop.  Several European countries plan to ban sales of new petrol-driven cars altogether within 10 years.  My guesstimates are than within 15 years, nearly 100% of all new car and lorry sales in the US and Europe will be electric,  Whatever the Troglodytes say or do.