The world is “quietly winning” on climate, despite assertions that unrealistic targets are hindering progress, a recent op-ed argues.
“The problem is not that we fail to hit the objectives we set for ourselves,” writes Bloomberg Opinion columnist David Fickling. “It’s that the drumbeat of bad-faith nihilism encourages us to forget the progress we’ve already made, and lower our ambitions for the future.”
The reason emissions continue to rise isn’t that nations are failing to uphold their climate promises, but “because of nations that aren’t making adequate promises at all,” Fickling adds, citing China’s coal consumption and Donald Trump’s “wrecking of U.S. climate measures.”
The false idea that climate targets are routinely being missed has prompted a trend of calls to “give up on climate,” Fickling writes. And the missed target of keeping warming below 1.5°C, set in the 2015 Paris Agreement, feeds that perception of failure.
But he argues that perception is wrong—and that nearly three decades of climate diplomacy have shown that “when we set ourselves an objective, more often than not we will hit it.”
He points to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol in which industrialized nations promised to cut emissions by 5% below 1990 levels, and ultimately achieved “a far deeper 22.6% cut.” The rise in global emissions in the 2000s came from countries outside the protocol, not from signatories failing to meet their commitments.
Another example he cites is the European Union’s first Paris pledge to cut emissions 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. “Plenty scoffed at the time,” but EU emissions were already 37% below 1990 last year, putting the bloc on track to achieve a 54% cut—nearly enough to meet an even tougher target adopted in 2020.
For further proof, he points to China’s promise to install 1,200 gigawatts of wind and solar power by 2030—which has already been surpassed with more than 1,700 gigawatts connected. “Few have even bothered to question the 3,600 gigawatts by 2035 goal President Xi Jinping announced in September.”
Even the 1.5°C Paris goal, now considered out of reach, has brought about significant progress. Emissions reduction plans from just five years ago would have resulted in about 3°C of warming by 2100, but current trajectories point to 2.3°C. Still disastrous, but undeniably better and evidence that the Paris Agreement has delivered against accusations of being a “fraud” and “dangerous incrementalism.”
“As solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and rechargeable batteries remake our power systems, the energy transition is on the brink of victory,” Fickling concludes. “Ignore the doomsayers who can’t see it.
