We’ll Always Have Paris

As most readers will recognize, my title is taken from the 1942 movie, Casablanca.  Near the end of the film, Rick (Humphrey Bogart) surprises his old lover Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) by putting her on an airplane to join her husband, resistance hero Victor Lazlo (Paul Henreid).  Rick tells her that “it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”  At this moment the fight against Nazism must take precedence over their love.  But “What about us?,” Ilsa asks plaintively. “We’ll always have Paris,” Rick replies.  Rick’s acknowledgement of the urgency of the present coupled with his embrace of the ongoing reality of the past is profoundly relevant to the problems of our day.

The Paris Climate Conference, scheduled to begin on November 30, 2015, was almost canceled after the November 13th Islamic State terrorist attack that took 137 lives. The juxtaposition of hatred and fanaticism on the one hand, and love and pragmatism on the other gave rise to some remarkable moments. A climate action demonstration scheduled for November 29^th was cancelled because of security concerns. Instead, there was a silent demonstration of 11,000 shoes placed in the Place de la République, representing the people who could not gather and make their voices heard. Pope Francis, who only months before had published the most significant environmental text of the early twenty-first century, sent black Oxfords with a laminated sign bearing his signature and the words “Laudato Si.”

Despite enormous challenges, the Conference was a remarkable success, due to the leadership of many extraordinary people, including Laurent Fabius, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs who presided over the sessions. The Conference rekindled the global climate movement and demonstrated the depth and breadth of support for climate action. The Conference produced a legally binding treaty, but it was not primarily a governance event. Its real change-making potential was in the soft power that it mobilized on which the world has failed to capitalize.

The Paris Agreement, which emerged from the Conference, encompasses a legally binding treaty under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).  It specifies rules for an ongoing procedure of goal-setting and reporting. It recognizes the internationally agreed 2°C temperature ceiling (along with an aspirational 1.5°C ceiling), and also makes clear that reaching the objective of the UNFCCC ultimately requires every country to reach the goal of net-zero emissions. The Agreement has no expiration date, and it specifies a timeline and a procedure for regular review of national commitments. In these respects, it improves and refines what had already been agreed to in the UNFCCC. 

The primary mechanism of the Paris Agreement is “pledge and review.”  Nations set goals which are collectively reviewed and then revised in light of the review.  Pledge and review has been a frequent model of international cooperation in the post-World War II period.  It incorporates Thomas Schelling’s insight that “a potent means of commitment, and sometimes the only means, is the pledge of one’s reputation.” However, reputational currency can change and those who are shameless cannot be shamed. If powerful nations meet their commitments and embrace ever greater ambition, they can create an upward spiral, but if they fail to meet their commitments and show no shame or regret this can lead to a downward spiral.

In any case enlightened leaders alone cannot take us to the net zero emissions envisioned by the Paris Agreement. This also requires the energy, enthusiasm, and sustained action of people around the world expressing themselves in their roles as citizens and consumers.  But since 2015 other issues have taken precedence over climate change (e.g., the war in Ukraine, immigration), and the normative power of international governance, which was always weak, has continued to erode. Some countries (notably the United States) have elected leaders who adopt policies that willfully move their countries away from meeting their nation’s climate commitments. A decade after the Paris Conference it seems clear that the hopes expressed in the Agreement will not be realized.

2024 was the warmest year we have experienced since at least 1850. It was also the first calendar year in which the Earth’s global mean surface temperature exceeded the 1.5°C aspirational goal of the Paris Agreement. While exceeding a temperature threshold in a single calendar year is not enough to say that the threshold has been definitively breached, the trendlines do suggest that 1.5 C is now in the rearview mirror. Each of the past 10 years (2015–2024) was one of the 10 warmest years on record, and global carbon emissions continue to increase as well as the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.

The Paris Agreement created pathways to a better world but we have chosen a different course.   Like Rick, we need to recognize that we are in a different world than the one we had hoped for, and we must confront these new challenges. In what follows I will provide six suggestions for how our thought and action should change in the light of these new realities.  

Let us begin with mitigation. Those who tell relatively happy stories about climate change tend to emphasize how the energy mix has changed through time.  For example, one NGO website tells us:

“95 percent of new energy capacity in the U.S. that is waiting to connect to the grid is carbon-free, primarily solar, wind, and battery. Around the world, countries are shifting to clean energy. In the Global South, 87 percent of capital expenditures on electricity generation are going into clean energy. The EU, Japan, and South Korea are also heavily moving to renewable energy”.

However, the energy mix is only part of the story.  What is left out is the fact that much of the renewable energy that is produced is added to, rather than replacing, fossil fuel energy.  While there is no simple ratio of replacement to addition, Richard York and Shannon Bell articulate the larger point: 

“History shows us that although new energy sources have been successfully added to the global energy system and have grown to provide a large share of the overall energy supply, it is entirely unprecedented for these additions to cause a sustained decline in the use of established energy sources”.

Even if renewables were entirely replacing fossil fuel produced energy, there is still no such thing as a “free lunch” when it comes to energy production. Producing energy necessarily involves transforming nature. Whether it is a matter of producing fossil fuels or powering bodies with fruits and nuts (which must be grown somewhere), the result is that nature is in a different state than it otherwise would have been in, and whatever state it is in will be unwanted or deleterious to some people or forms of life. When it comes to mitigation what is needed is a much more systematic perspective on energy, rather than a narrow focus on the energy mix or other limited dimensions of energy production and consumption.

Second, we need to focus more on adaptation. While this is increasingly recognized, it is still not often appreciated just how incredibly difficult adaptation is.  Adaptation is expensive, requires long-term planning, and communities must be cohesive enough to accept trade-offs.  Consider, for example, Del Mar, California, an affluent village on the Pacific Ocean, where everyone is an environmentalist. A nationally important rail line goes through the village on top of cliffs overlooking the ocean. These cliffs are already crumbling due to sea level rise. Everyone agrees that the rail line must be moved, but no one agrees about where to move it. The planning process is slow, any change will be expensive, and inevitably some people will be hurt. Now scale this up to communities that are less affluent and where not everyone is an environmentalist. Still, a great deal of adaptation will happen because there is no other choice (“adapt or die”), but much of the adaptation that occurs is likely to be stupid, needlessly expensive, and massively unjust. In order to do better we need to learn from careful in depth case studies of adaptation, and we need innovative thinking about how to adapt at scale, especially in resource poor communities.

Third, we need to accept that there is no “Plan B.”  Geoengineering is sometimes discussed as a “silver bullet” that will save us from ourselves or at least buy us some time. And Indeed there probably will be attempts to alter the Earth’s radiative balance through stratospheric aerosol injection (releasing reflective particles into the stratosphere), marine cloud brightening (increasing the reflectivity of marine clouds by spraying them with seawater droplets or other substances), surface albedo modification (increasing the reflectivity of surfaces on Earth), or space-based reflectors.  There are too many oligarchs and states with divergent interests to prevent this from happening in a world in which global governance is weak and eroding.  The consequences of these interventions may range from abject failure, disaster, or benefits for some and losses to others.  But what none of these technologies will do is return the climate to its pre-industrial baseline, or produce a geologically stable climate regime.  

Fourth, in order to do better at mitigation and adaptation, and to face the world squarely, we need more disciplined attention. Many scholars and climate change activists, especially in the United States, focus excessively on “denialism”—as if the failure to act on climate change is primarily caused by people’s unwillingness to sign up to a particular creed or set of beliefs.  It is true that lies and misinformation, produced by powerful actors who prioritize their own short-term interests over the future of life on earth, is a serious problem, but one that we have lived with for decades or centuries regarding a wide range of issues (e.g., the consequences of egalitarian economic policies, environmental regulation, etc.).   In a well-functioning democracy, these forces can be overcome. There are many reasons why this has not happened with climate change in the United States and perhaps some other countries (e.g., the United States is not a fully functional democracy).  But it is important to realize that among the general public, indifference is more prevalent and important than denialism.  A result of electing Trump in 2024 was the abandonment of America’s climate commitments, but Americans did not elect Trump for that reason.  They had not shifted to denialism or even made an “all things considered” judgement that climate action was less important than other things they cared about.  As a political issue, climate change had simply become less visible or even invisible to many people, and barely figured in their voting behavior.  Many Americans liked the Paris climate show when it was prime time in 2015, but by 2024 the memory had faded and they preferred the Trump show to Paris reruns or any of the other alternatives on offer.  Americans changed the channel and gave up the Paris commitments out of indifference rather than denialism.  The moral of the story is that we need a better, more disciplined audience that is willing to tune in to a show for more than one season.  

We also need a better story.  Climate communication has often been criticized for the artificiality and abstractness of its language (e.g., “mean surface temperature,” “parts per million,” “greenhouse gas equivalent,” etc.).  But another part of the climate story that many people find alienating is the way that it centers on rights, duties, laws, regulations, judicial opinions and so forth. This kind of language is an obstacle for gaining public attention and buy in for many issues, but it is especially difficult for climate change. Climate change is an unprecedented global phenomenon unfolding over decades and centuries, one to which everyone contributes and is affected by, but in radically different proportions.  The common law traditions of the Anglophone world and the common-sense morality produced by modernity fit clumsily at best with the challenges of climate change.  We need new stories, concepts, and characters for conceptualizing climate change and motivating action.  One resource for this is the rights of nature movement, but I also think that we need a more spiritual, less juridical outlook that sees nature as sacred and not just the bearer of rights.

Finally, through all of this, we must be resilient. Beyond the challenge of adapting to new planetary conditions, we must be able to survive and even thrive in the face of our own failures, and ceaseless, often unpredictable, change. What makes the climate change that is now underway different from the changing climates of the past is that it is anthropogenic. We are causing it, and we must learn to live with what we are bringing about. Our children may live in a world in which the seas have reclaimed Miami Beach, and Miami itself has begun to reassemble an island city; and by then several member states of the United Nations may have ceased to exist.  But people will still fall in love, have babies, and wonder what life is all about. Questions of meaning amid uncertainty, suffering, fear and loss will increasingly move to the center of human experience.

Climate change presents challenges that require us to mobilize the resources of science, medicine, engineering, law, economics, politics, and the social sciences. It also poses spiritual, philosophical, and therapeutic challenges about how to live. The collective memory of Paris can be a resource for rising to these challenges. It is a reminder that change is possible and that the nations of the world can espouse a common goal. But for Paris to have this power of inspiration, we must not succumb to nostalgia. The ultimate goal of creating a just world in which people and nature flourish and are respected remains the same, but the landscape has changed.  We need to reorder and reprioritize our values, and we need new concepts and ideas.  Like Rick and Ilsa we’ll always have Paris, and like them we must overcome the temptation to lock ourselves in a backward-looking nostalgic straitjacket, and instead see Paris as an inspiration for acting now with urgency against one of the greatest threats that humanity has ever faced.