They have come to Germany, some 25,000 diplomats, scientists and lobbyists from 200 nations, to put flesh on the bare bones of the climate agreement signed two years ago. Back then, Paris was the venue for the members of the congregation, who pledged to limit further global warming to 2C. It was Fiji’s turn to play host this time, but the congregation had swollen to a size that the island nation could not accommodate, so Bonn stepped in.
The summit, budgeted to cost $136.3m (£103m), began on a high note: a new member was added to the flock. Bashar al-Assad’s Syria signed up to the unenforceable agreement, presumably intending to honour the pledge, as he had his earlier promise to abandon the use of chemical weapons.
All religions have their rituals, and the believers in global warming have theirs. To offset the enormous carbon footprint created by the jet-setting congregants, Germany’s Angela Merkel has issued bicycles for them to use between hotels and meeting rooms, and refillable bottles for tap water to avoid the production of 500,000 plastic cups.
Merkel, whose shutdown of nuclear plants has forced Germany to rely more heavily on coal, prefers increasing — yes, increasing — her country’s emissions to letting it go dark when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine. Germany now generates 40% of its electricity from coal; in America, the figure is 30% and falling, making Merkel’s attack on the apostate, Donald Trump, more a diversionary tactic than an expression of true outrage.
President Trump has nailed his objections to the warming thesis to the door of the US Environmental Protection Agency: climate change is a hoax, fake news, which is impoverishing hard-working coal miners. He has set in motion America’s withdrawal from the Paris accord in 2020, the earliest possible date.
Until then, America will attend the summits. Trump says his withdrawal might be withdrawn if his art of the deal produces an agreement that is fairer to his country. The current arrangement requires America to reduce emissions, while China is permitted to increase pollution from its own plants and the 700 coal-burning electric-generating stations it is financing around the world. The president, who handles cognitive dissonance rather well, feels no need to reconcile his willingness to rejoin an emissions-fighting coalition with his view that emissions are not a problem.
Like all true believers, Merkel says there is no room for renegotiation — bend a knee to Paris, or leave and be, well, damned. But please don’t take with you the US troops that we rely on to prevent Vladimir Putin nibbling away at Nato’s geographic buffer. And do keep sending money to developing nations so they don’t decide their emissions pledges are too costly to honour.
Both parties know they are right. To the Bonn congregants, dissenters are “deniers”, a word previously reserved for those who challenge the occurrence of the Holocaust. To the Trumpkins, the climate models have been conjured up to expand the regulatory state. “The distinctive characteristic of academics, their DNA, is doubt,” writes Jean Tirole in his book, Economics for the Common Good. Neither view in Bonn is possessed of that academic devil, doubt.
The Trump side is cutting off funding for further research, while the believers bar doubters from access to academic journals and, with the help of state law enforcement officials, try to toss corporate dissenters into jail, as burning at the stake is no longer being considered an available punishment.
This mutual distrust compounds the political difficulty of devising policies that persuade voters to bear the costs of policies that will primarily benefit not themselves, but future generations. This is a problem of the sort that politicians hate to confront. We do not know with certainty whether the Earth is warming, or, if it is, the reason, and how cataclysmic the consequences of inaction might be. We do not know whether recent weather upheavals — from the UK to Houston to Puerto Rico to fire-scorched California and Portugal — are early warning signs, or mere continuations of past life-and property-destroying storms and fires. We do know that the costs of taking what Churchill called “action this day” must be defended by current officeholders, while the benefits of those tax-funded outlays will not be reaped until those officials are long retired. Their reluctance to act is understandable.
Which brings us to an unintended benefit of the planned Trump withdrawal. State and city governments in the US, most of them Trump-haters and eager to embarrass him publicly, are stepping up programmes to cut greenhouse gas emissions in their areas. More important, America’s private sector has swung into action. More than 900 businesses have pledged to reduce their emissions by as much as Barack Obama claimed the Paris agreement would. The executives of these companies now have their reputations on the line with investors and their increasingly green customers.
Trump is a passing phenomenon when compared with the long lives of investments in plant and equipment. No executive wants to be required to explain why an investment made today is later valueless because it no longer meets environmental standards.
The 25,000 delegates in Bonn believe, as did Rick Blaine, owner of Rick’s cafe in the movie Casablanca, that, “We will always have Paris”. Trump, so far, prefers to be rid of meddlesome limits on emissions and move backwards into a world dominated by fossil fuels.
Irwin Stelzer is a business adviser
