Paris: optimism, pessimism and realism

ABSTRACT

The climate agreement signed in Paris in December 2015 has been widely hailed as a huge step towards limiting climate change to a safe 2°C. It is not; Paris locks the world into a future where at least a 3–4°C rise by 2100 is virtually inevitable. This will mean a world where there will be massive famine and conflict in much of Africa and the Middle East, serious hunger in South Asia, huge migration pressures but manageable problems in the Americas and more difficult but probably still manageable problems in Europe. Globalisation may collapse, which will be particularly challenging for the UK with its dependence on food imports and international trade. In politics the 200-year hegemony of the idea of progress will be over, while our focus will become more local, putting great pressure on the idea of human universalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• Paris conference
• adaptation
• world politics
• progress
• global conflict
• IPCC
• UNFCCC

Acknowledgements

I started writing this piece before I was aware of and read John Foster’s book, After Sustainability (Foster 2015). This paper is complementary I hope to Foster’s work, trying to address some of the political and economic implications of climate change, but I took much inspiration from his book, and from subsequent exchanges with him.

I am as ever grateful to my Green House colleagues for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and in particular to Ray Cunningham for first suggesting this topic, and to Rupert Read, Jonathan Essex and Victor Anderson (who wasn’t at all happy about it).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.