THE CARBON WAR

Epilogue 337
other areas where they are in dispute to face down a shared global threat, and
with seriousness of intent. It may have taken them a quarter of a century to get
there, but it was a display of global co-operation without precedent in history.
The scope of the Paris Agreement involves a total system change to the
lifeblood of the global economy: decarbonisation of energy. Governments
wrote into the treaty the common understanding that they probably need to
accomplish this incredible U-turn within the lifetimes of most schoolchildren
and indeed college students alive today.
It must seem unbelievable, for people who haven’t been following the
long-running negotiations. But it is true.
How was it possible? Crucially, the story of the Paris Agreement is about
both national actors and non-national actors. As for the national actors, the
federal governments, I know more of what went on behind the closed doors,
from talking to top-table participants since 12 th December, than I have written
in my eye-witness account. But definitive accounts of the summit for policy
experts will soon be written by people who were actually in those rooms. I am
writing my book for the policy experts’ relatives, as it were. I do not think my
narrative will need correcting materially once detailed forensics of the negotiations
are published by practitioners.
In the brew that made for ultimate success in Paris, an unprecedented
legion of key groups in civil society descended on the summit with the express
purpose of egging governments on. A thousand cities committed to go 100%
renewable, some as early as 2030. So did more than fifty of the world’s biggest
companies, one as early as 2020. Investors with funds worth more than 3 trillion
dollars pledged to divest from fossil fuels and/or put shareholder pressure on
traditional energy companies to decarbonise. The list of such inducements to
national governments is long, as chapters 29 to 32 show.
I believe this double act of governments and civil society is going to
change the world in unprecedented and mostly positive ways in 2016 and
beyond. My early contacts with the corporate world after the summit suggest
an encouraging number of other business people share this view.
Others disagree, of course. They point to the inability of the emissions-reductions
commitments made in the Paris Agreement to contain global warming
near 2˚C, and the lack of legally-binding commitments even for those.
True, the targets themselves are not binding, but a global process capable
of achieving them and much more is written in legally-binding language. The
ratchet, as negotiators refer to it informally, involves obligations to prepare,
communicate and maintain targets and pursue domestic measures to achieve