By Noah Rothman
Monday, November 08, 2021
A Washington Post investigation published Sunday
conclusively proves what you probably already knew. When it comes to the
international community’s efforts to mitigate climate change, the biggest
challenge isn’t climate change but the international community.
The Post’s comprehensive investigation
uncovered a series of discrepancies in how the world measures greenhouse gas
emissions by country, which led the paper to conclude that the data
environmental crusaders are relying on “to save the world” is woefully
inaccurate.
For example, according to its reports to the United
Nations, Malaysia’s trees somehow manage to clear far more carbon from the
atmosphere than the trees in neighboring Indonesia. Vietnamese refrigerators
are shockingly efficient to the point that they release almost no fluorinated
gasses, surpassing even the most technologically advanced models in the West.
The soil in the Central African Republic can somehow absorb so much carbon that
it offsets almost all the emissions produced by the Russian Federation. And so
on.
It’s not just the developing world, which has managed to
secure for itself what the Post discovered was “wide latitude”
when it comes to its own reporting standards, that is a source of frustration.
Big countries like China and Russia don’t even bother to produce accurate
numbers around their methane emissions or join global frameworks designed to
limit their production. Even democratic polities such as Australia and the E.U.
are guilty of selective reporting, and big nations (including the U.S.) take
advantage of an unmeasurable guestimate that allows them to deduct their
landmasses from net carbon emissions. The result of both “incomplete reporting”
and “apparently willful mistakes” in the data has led researchers into a state
of apoplexy.
This can only come as a shock to anyone who doesn’t
understand the dynamics of organizations that are global in scope, most of
which rapidly become a cartel in service to the interests of the majority of
its members: smaller, non-democratic states. Moreover, the tone of surprise on
the part of this report’s authors is only possible if you were inclined to
summarily dismiss conservative critiques of the Paris Climate Accords.
“Climate negotiators have known for decades that this
data-gathering process is flawed,” the Post’s dispatch read, “but
instead they have focused on persuading global leaders to engage in serious
talks and take real steps to rein in emissions.” As climate researcher Philippe
Ciais put it, “If the baseline is underreported, the percentage of emission
reductions that you get will be flawed.” The self-reporting requirements in the
Paris agreement are, according to atmospheric scientist Ray Weiss, “like the
parties going on diets without ever having to weigh themselves.” In short,
Ciais concluded, “everything becomes a bit of a fantasy.”
None of this should be surprising. When the Accord was
reached in 2015, we
knew that no member country had to commit to meaningful greenhouse-gas
emissions reductions, much less accurate reporting requirements. We knew each
nation’s pledge was voluntary, and their promises were met with almost no
scrutiny. We knew that the Accord would provide political cover for developing
nations to extract political concessions and wealth transfers from
the developed world because there were no teeth associated with violating these
self-set commitments. The best you could say of the Paris Agreement was that it
received a larger buy-in from the developing world than its predecessor, the
Copenhagen Agreement, but that came at the expense of the Accord’s efficacy.
Not that this will compel any of the Accord’s supporters
to reexamine their priors. When the Trump administration announced its
intention to withdraw from the Accords in 2017, the response from the political
commentariat was downright
hysterical. It was a “traitorous act of war” by the president. This was
“the day the United States resigned as the leader of the free world.” It marked
the triumph of “a different brand of American ideology.” Some enterprising
neurotics even invented the category of “environmental racism” to condemn the Trump administration’s
actions.
But Paris was just one of several hundred overlapping and often
competing climate agreements that contributed to what the UN Environment
Programme termed “treaty congestion.” And none of it has been very effective.
After all, four years after the Accords were established, only two signatory
nations had met their own self-set objectives: industrial powerhouses Morocco and Gambia. That is, if you can believe their
stats.
Though it runs the risk of “pouncing,” anyone who looked
skeptically upon the Paris climate agreement deserves a victory lap. Few were
willing to buck the motivated consensus around what American Compass executive
director Oren Cass wrote in these pages was essentially a “stapling
exercise.” In the end, the world will have to satisfy itself with what
Stanford University Professor Rob Jackson admitted was only “the sense that, at
least the countries are providing something and participating and thinking
about it.”
If thinking and talking about climate change was the
international community’s chief objective, the world is wildly outperforming
expectations.
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