When
I sat down to hear his case a few weeks ago, he didn’t evince much
patience for the argument that American politicians couldn’t agree even
on whether climate change is real, much less on how to combat it. “If
you’re not bringing math skills to the problem,” he said with a sort of
amused asperity, “then representative democracy is a problem.” What
follows is a condensed transcript of his remarks, lightly edited for
clarity.
On whether new commitments to reduce
greenhouse-gas emissions expected at the United Nations climate-change
conference in Paris in December mean the world is now serious about the
problem:
It’s good to have people making commitments.
It’s really good. But if you really look at those commitments—which are
not binding, but even if you say they will all be achieved—they fall
dramatically short of the reductions required to reduce CO2 emissions
enough to prevent a scenario where global temperatures rise 2 degrees
Celsius. I mean, these commitments won’t even be a third of what you
need.
And one of the interesting things about this problem is, if
you have a country that says, “Okay, we’re going to get on a pathway for
an 80 percent reduction in CO2 by 2050,” it might make a commitment
that “Hey, by 2030, we’ll be at 30 percent reduction.” But that first 30
percent is dramatically, dramatically easier than getting to 80
percent. So everything that’s hard has been saved for post-2030—and even
these 2030 commitments aren’t enough. And many of them won’t be
achieved.
Source: The Atlantic