The Paris Agreement, December 2015, marked the first real breakthrough for the UN-led negotiations. Trade unions and environmental campaigners made huge efforts to raise public support for a deal.

Uniting the world in a single, voluntary treaty tackle climate change for the first time in history,

The Paris Agreement set a framework:

• To keep global temperatures to well below 2C above pre-industrial times.
• To make further efforts to limit the increase to a safe increase of no more than 1.5 degrees.
• For ‘Net zero’ emissions globally by 2050: so the amount of greenhouse gas emissions by human activity must be limited to levels that trees, plants and oceans can absorb naturally.
• “common but differentiated responsibilities”; which that means is that countries that got wealthy through burning fossil fuels historically, have the responsibility to set the pace and provide support for countries that are still poor (and also have a low per capita carbon footprint) initially set at $100 billion a year, but now ungraded to $1.5trillion a year by 2035
• each country to be responsible for setting its own targets, given regular positive nudges forward by IPCC reports and with a presumption to ratchet up targets and plans every five years
• An obligation on all signatories to educate their populations on the nature of the crisis and the measures needed to deal with it.

Because COP agreements are by consensus, which means that every country essentially has a veto – what this has meant is that further agreed measures every year have proceeded at the pace of the slowest, most reluctant participants. This has essentially been centred on petro-states like Saudi Arabia (even though they are now investing massively in solar power themselves).

Nevertheless, progress has been real. At the time of the Paris COP the agreed projection was that temperatures would rise by a catastrophic global average of 4C over pre industrial averages. This projection on the trajectory of current policies is down to 2.8C, and on current pledges to 2.3 – 2.5C. This gives us a lifeline, and every tenth of a degree has to be fought for.

In the second Trump Presidency starting in 2025, we are now in a period in which the world’s biggest bully pulpit is being used to speak power to truth on climate. As the world’s largest petro state, the US has

• abandoned the Paris Agreement and related UN climate organisations, and is actively seeking “Global Energy Dominance” by doubling down on fossil fuels domestically
• trying to squeeze renewables out of the energy mix
• trying to boost coal, oil, gas and nuclear, despite their greater expense,
• scrapping environmental protection and efficiency regulations,
• defunding agencies researching climate related issues
• and removing all mention of climate change from government websites.

This is also for export, as they try to get other countries to agree to buy their fossil fuel exports and abandon renewable energy. As part of this, they are promoting – and funding – Parties in other countries that support this agenda, even at the expense of their own citizens. We can see that in this country with the outright denialism of Reform  and the deer in the headlights approach of the Conservatives, who claim to recognise that the climate crisis is real, but don’t propose to do anything about it.

This will do damage to the transition we need, but by 2025 60% of countries are half a decade past peak fossil fuel use and renewable energy is being invested in at more than double the rate of fossil fuels.

In 2018 the UN scientists’ panel (IPCC) published a global warming progress report in 2018. Known as the 1.5 Degrees Report, it bluntly warned:

• Greenhouse gas emissions had already risen so rapidly that were are only a dozen years for action to be taken to keep global warming to a maximum of 1.5C.
• Beyond 1.5 degrees of overheating, even half a degree more would significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty faced for hundreds of millions of people.
• Carbon pollution would have to be cut by 45% by 2030, and come down to zero by 2050.

The impact of the COVID pandemic in closing down large parts of industry across the world during lockdowns cut carbon emissions by 7% in 2020. That trajectory would have needed to be sustained to keep on track. Instead, emissions have been growing again since.

This is at a slower rate than before Paris, and the effect of the agreements reached there and since has been to cut projected global heating from 4C and up by the end of the century to 2.7C on current policies, and 2.3-2.5C on current pledges.

We are now in a race between the ecological tipping points we are reaching as we rise to 1.5C and above, probably by the end of this decade, and the increasingly rapid global spread of renewable technologies which are undermining the economic viability of a fossil fuel energy future.

Ecological Tipping Points

These are not triggered all at once at any particular level of temperature rise, but the higher they go, the more likely they will be breached.

They include.

• The dieback of the Amazon Rain Forest and Arctic boreal forests
• The bleaching and die back of Coral Reefs
• Release of methane from melting permafrost
• Disintegration of the Antarctic and Greenland Ice sheets
• Disruption to the West African and Indian Monsoons

Some of these are already well under way. All of them have knock-on consequences that will be extremely costly, in all respects. A full exploration of these tipping points is here from Carbon Brief.

This video from Professor Tim Lenton, speaking at the National Climate Emergency Briefing in November 2025 is a succinct summary.

All this is driven by increasing greenhouse gas emissions. The only hope we have is that these will peak globally soon and decline rapidly thereafter, even though we are already poised to reach 1.5C by 2030.

Tipping points towards global sustainability

New electricity capacity in 2025 overwhelmingly met by Renewables

Source: IRENA – Renewable Energy Capacity Statistics 2025, see HERE

Reuters reports that, due to investment in renewable energy running at double the rate of investment in fossil fuels, by mid decade  87% of power generation investment in emerging economies and China flowed into clean energy; and that three-quarters of global fossil fuel demand is now in nations that have already peaked.

Nearly 60% of economies passed a peak in fossil fuel power generation five or more years ago.The remainder have yet to reach a peak in fossil fuel electricity generation, or have had a peak within the past four years.

Three factors underlie this

1. Physics: Fossil fuels are wasteful: two-thirds of the energy in coal, oil or gas is lost to heat or inefficiency. Solar, electric motors, and heat pumps are two to four times as efficient. We can do more with less energy at far lower cost. That is expressed very well in this graphic.

2. Economics: Fossil fuels are commodities built on extraction: as reserves deplete, it gets more expensive to access what’s left, like in the North Sea. Electro-based technology is manufactured: so the more that gets built, the cheaper and better it becomes. On average, costs fall by around 20% every time deployment doubles. In most of the world, solar and wind are now the lowest-cost new power. Investment follows – today, two-thirds of global energy capital flows into “electrotech”, while oil majors are investing more in stock buybacks than in new wells.

3. Geopolitics: The old energy system left three-quarters of humanity dependent on expensive, imported fuels. Electro-based technologies unlock local resources. Almost all countries have enough sun and wind to meet their energy needs many times over. In fact, emerging and developing economies hold 70% of the world’s solar and wind resources and 50% of the critical minerals for the energy transition.

In this race between disaster and survival, there are no prizes for anyone if we don’t win it.

You could perhaps believe from the snail’s pace of government reactions that global warming has only been known about for a few years. But this is not the case. Our understanding of how certain atmospheric gases trap heat dates back nearly 200 years.

In 1824 Joseph Fourier, a French mathematician and physicist, considered the following mystery – why doesn’t the planet keep heating up as it receives sunlight? What is regulating our atmospheric temperature? Joseph Fourier’s answer described what we now know as ‘the greenhouse effect’.

Carbon dioxide, ‘natural gas’ (methane), and other ‘greenhouse gases’ trap heat that would otherwise escape from the Earth’s atmosphere. With the right mix, these gases do a critical job ensuring the atmosphere holds onto enough heat to support every kind of life on the planet. Without them, the Earth would lose so much heat that life as we know it would be impossible.

But the problem is that greenhouse gas levels are all too high, because of human activities, trapping too much of the sun’s energy as heat. This has upset the natural systems that regulate our climate.

Our oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere wherever air meets water. Wind causes waves and turbulence, giving more opportunity for the water to absorb the carbon dioxide. … Ocean plants take in the carbon dioxide and give off oxygen, just like land plants.

In 1896 Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist, was the first to measure how carbon dioxide (CO2) contributes to the greenhouse effect. He later made the link between burning fossil fuels and global warming.

Look at the table below for other key events in the history of climate change and the growing international response to the crisis.

A History of Climate Change

Adapted from the BBC ‘A brief history of climate change’.

The first wake-up call

In 1988, James Hanson, director of NASA, (the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration), testified before a packed US congressional hearing that he was 99% sure that human-induced global warming was happening. That testimony marked the beginning of an international response to climate change. Hundreds of scientists and policymakers discussed emissions’ reduction at a world conference in Toronto later that month. The UN then set up the independent panel of scientists known as the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change). It held its first meeting in November that year.

Even the conservative Time magazine recognised the gravity of the situation in 1988 and put an endangered planet Earth on its front cover. It called for “… a universal crusade to save the planet.”

“Now, more than ever, the world needs leaders who can inspire their fellow citizens with a fiery sense of mission, not a nationalistic or military campaign but a universal crusade to save the planet,” stated Time magazine’s editorial. 

This international recognition that climate change was real and caused by humans resulted in the largest environmental conference ever held, the Rio Earth Summit.

Rio Earth Summit 1992 – recognises ‘dangerous climate change’ 

In 1992, governments met for the first United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro where they signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change the (UNFCCC). This document bound governments to act to avoid ‘dangerous climate change’ but did not specify what ‘dangerous’ meant, nor the actions required to avoid it. However, the Framework Convention is the basis for all the UN’s climate negotiations. 

One of the more memorable moments of the conference was the address given to world delegates by a 12-year-old girl called Severn Cullis-Suzuki.

Severn Cullis-Suzuki aged 12 years speaking at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992

In 2018, the young climate activist, Greta Thunberg spoke at the UN’s climate conference. She said, ‘You only talk about moving forward with the same ideas that got us into this mess.’

View Greta’s address here:

Arguments around COPs

Arguing that all countries have to cut emissions at the same rate, regardless of their level of development, is unfair on poorer countries.

Total vs Per Capita carbon footprints. On current emissions, China now has the world’s largest carbon footprint by a long way. But it also has a population that is larger than Europe, North America, South America and Australasia combined. So does India.

Small rich countries can have a small total carbon footprint, but a very high per capita carbon footprint (the average made by dividing the total by the number of people in the country). So, China has a total carbon footprint about double that of the United States, but because it has a population that is four times as big, the footprint of each citizen is about half the US level.

Calculation by territorial production or calculation by consumption. One aspect of globalisation is that a high proportion of goods consumed in the global north are made in the global south.

A lot of “dirty” high carbon industries have closed down or shrunk in the rich countries and expanded in the developing world. Calculating carbon emissions by territorial production means that goods manufactured for export are counted as part of the emissions of the exporting country.

The impact of this can be very large. As the most extreme case, between 2002 and 2008, 48% of China’s emissions were from goods produced for export.

For the UK, while the government likes to claim that carbon emissions have been cut by 44% since 1990 while the economy has grown by 78%, the WWF has calculated that 46% of the UK’s true carbon footprint comes from overseas emissions made from making goods for UK consumers. Taking that into account means that the actual drop in UK emissions is just 15%.

For trade unions, there are three main challenges in the coming years:

• Campaigning for the UN to make the Paris Agreement really effective.
• Lobbying the UK government to invest for a zero-carbon future and resisting the greenlash from the Right that threatens, jobs and energy costs in the short term and survival much quicker than they think.
• Unions to work together for a just transition, and collectively to agree a plan for a zero-carbon future

In the UK, the TUC’s report, A just transition to a greener, fairer economy (July 2019), restated its support for the Paris Agreement. The TUC wants ‘a fair and robust plan to get there that everyone can get behind. That means government, business and trade unions working together on a ‘just transition’.

‘Working people must have a say through transition agreements in their workplaces. And there must be a guaranteed path to high-quality work in a green economy for anyone whose job may be at risk,’ the TUC says.

‘A brief history of climate change’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15874560

UN’s 1.5 degrees report: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/

Naomi Klein interviewed at the Paris Summit by Democracy Now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPs-8n9efWQ

James Hansen Why I must speak out about climate change https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWInyaMWBY8

TUC 2019, A Just Transition to a Greener, Fairer Economy: https://www.tuc.org.uk/research-analysis/reports/just-transition-greener-fairer-economy

UN 2018, Solidarity and Just Transition Silesia Declaration, https://cop24.gov.pl/fileadmin/user_upload/Solidarity_and_Just_Transition_Silesia_Declaration_2_.pdf