By Rupert Darwall
“The 2015 Paris climate should take its place as one of the great triumphs in history,” Jonathan Chait wrote two days after it was concluded. Todd Stern, America’s climate envoy for all but eight months of Barack Obama’s presidency, was indispensable in making the Paris agreement happen. With his new book, Landing the Paris Climate Agreement: How It Happened, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next (MIT Press, October 2024), Stern has written an indispensable history of the genesis, the whys, and the wherefores of the Paris agreement, indispensable both to supporters and critics and therefore for members of the incoming Trump administration as they consider, for a second time, future American participation in the agreement.
Stern’s account starts with the run-up to the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference. Stern knew what needed to be done. The firewall in the original United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), signed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, had to be erased and a treaty text produced that wouldn’t be sent to the United States Senate for its advice and consent.
Stern had witnessed the Senate’s preemptive rejection of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol because the UN firewall protected China and other major developing countries from future treaty requirements to cap their emissions. This goal was initially opposed by the Europeans, who wanted to bounce the U.S. into a legally binding climate treaty that he knew would fail and premised on the delusory belief that developing countries would follow if the developed world led by example.
Stern had an ally in the Danish conference hosts, who wanted a short, legally nonbinding agreement. The longtime British climate negotiator, Pete Betts, had also suggested that countries should submit their own national plans as part of a new agreement, rather than negotiating emissions targets and inking them into a treaty. But a quartet of China, India, Brazil, and South Africa moved to block any agreement that set a goal for agreeing to a legally binding treaty. “They were not prepared to take the risk that a legally binding agreement would bind them,” Stern writes.
The Copenhagen conference of the parties (COP) is usually portrayed as a disaster. It ended in near-chaos, when a handful of South American countries blocked the conference from adopting the two-and-a-half-page Copenhagen Accord and only just succeeded in “taking note” of it. Stern challenges this assessment. The U.S. side never saw Copenhagen as a failure, he says. “We knew that the accord was an important document that it began an essential pivot away from the old firewall paradigm and was a potentially significant step forward.”
The next COP was in Cancún. “If Copenhagen was cold and gray with wet snow … Cancún was the opposite. The air was soft and warm, the sky was blue, the Gulf of Mexico lapped the edges of the beach,” Stern recalls. Stern’s aim was to embed the Copenhagen Accord in the process, while China did its best to kill it. A European colleague summed up the dilemma: the U.S. would not accept the firewall between developed and developing countries, but China and its allies would not give it up.
However, China had overplayed its hand at Copenhagen. Some developing countries, especially the supposedly vulnerable small island states, wanted collective action on climate, creating the first fissures in the G77 plus China bloc of developing nations. At Cancún, the essential components of the Copenhagen Accord were transmuted into the Cancún Agreements. That was reinforced at the 2011 Durban COP, which agreed on a platform to develop “a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force under the Convention applicable to all parties,” the last four words indicating the extent to which China and the firewall holdouts were playing defense.
Barack Obama’s reelection and his appointment of John Kerry—“the conscience of the Senate on climate change,” according to Stern—as secretary of state saw the Obama administration make its decisive move with its opening to China. Stern rejects the idea that this amounted to a climate G2. “We still disagreed on pivotal points, and many other countries played crucial roles.” Elsewhere, Stern writes, “We now had, in effect, a kind of partnership—competitive, sparring, and contentious nonetheless, authored by our presidents.” As Stern’s Chinese counterpart, Xie Zenhua, vice-chair of China’s equivalent of Gosplan, remarked, “If even the United States and China can reach agreement, there are no issues too difficult to solve.”
The China outreach began with Kerry’s first trip as secretary of state to Beijing in April 2013, and then elevated at the Sunnylands meeting between Obama and Xi Jinping in Rancho Mirage two months later and consummated after the U.S. convinced the Chinese that the two presidents should jointly announce their intended climate targets a year before the Paris conference. “When Presidents Obama and Xi walked down the aisle in Beijing in November 2014, they tied the two sides’ fortunes together and made success in Paris an imperative,” Stern observes.
Even so, at a pre-Paris meeting in Germany, the nine-page text of the draft treaty had ballooned to an unmanageable 31 pages, made more fraught by South Africa’s Nozipho Diseko’s speech comparing developing countries in the climate negotiations with apartheid. The situation wasn’t as bad as it might have looked. As Betts had told Stern a few weeks earlier, “If it’s us against the developing countries, we lose; if it’s us plus the vulnerables and progressives, we win.”
This aligned landing a deal in Paris with Stern’s environmental beliefs. “I situated the United States squarely on the side of progressives,” Stern says. That meant acceding to the demands of the small island states, led by the Marshall Islands and their British lawyer and climate activist Farhana Yamin, for inclusion of a goal to limit temperature rise on preindustrial levels to 1.5 degrees Celsius and net zero emissions. Yamin had pitched net zero to Stern two years earlier. Net zero was easier for people to understand than 1.5 degrees, Yamin argued. “When she laid out her goal of a net-zero goal for the world by 2050, it seemed so diplomatically outlandish at the time that I nearly laughed,” Stern writes. “I couldn’t imagine countries endorsing net zero by 2050 when they wouldn’t accept even a global cut by 2050 just a few years earlier. But Farhana turned out to be right: not about the politics of 2013, but about where we needed to go.”
This conversation highlights the function of “science” in climate policy. Its role is not to illuminate; it is to sanctify what had already been decided politically. An example is the supposedly “science-based goal” of holding global temperature to 2 degrees above preindustrial levels, which had been plucked out of thin air by European environment ministers in 1996. The telltale sign that the 2-degree limit is political is the preindustrial baseline. As the climate scientist Judith Curry points out, there is no reason to use the mid-nineteenth century as the baseline, which is near the end of the coldest period of the millennium. Just as Stern found the Gulf of Mexico more congenial than the Baltic, most humans would prefer today’s climate to the chillier climate prevailing at the end of the Little Ice Age; but in the eyes of the environmental movement, the Industrial Revolution constitutes the original sin of modern civilization—hence, the now-standard preindustrial baseline.
Similarly, in the run-up to Paris, small islands acquired prime victimhood status, for whom 1.5 degrees Celsius was “a critical threshold issue,” says Stern— without any scientific justification. Just over a quarter of a century before the Paris COP, a senior UN environmental official claimed that entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming was not reversed. Of course, none were. As Charles Darwin figured out in the 1830s, low-lying coral atolls are formed by the slow subsidence of the ocean bed, that is to say, by rising sea levels. Yet the antiscientific claim that the existence of these islands is imperiled by carbon dioxide emissions led to the inclusion of the 1.5-degree target in the Paris agreement and the West—note, not the world—to pursue the extreme and unachievable goal of 100 percent decarbonization by 2050.
Stern’s verdict on the Paris agreement as a “paradigm shifter” is surely correct. The deal was, he writes, “better than the best-case scenarios we imagined. It was universal, its obligations and expectations applying to all countries. It was durable, built to continually renew itself.” Along the way, Stern is generous with crediting others, but much of the credit is his. He maintained a strategic view of where he wanted to get to and understood the obstacles to getting there; he knew his and his president’s walkaway bottom lines; he worked the room to develop good relations with the key players and the peripheral ones; he maintained a receptivity to new ideas wherever they came from; he possessed a negotiator’s sense of timing; and, decisively, he maximized the potential of the Obama administration’s climate dialogue with China and developed a relationship of mutual trust with his Chinese opposite number.
Outside the climate bubble, a different verdict comes into view. Stern characterizes the Paris agreement as a bet—a wager that the rising force of norms and expectations would set off a chain reaction with the potential to create a decarbonized global economy. Framed this way, Paris is a multitrillion-dollar bet that was always going to fail. China and other large developing economies fought to retain the UNFCCC firewall because they didn’t want to decarbonize. Xie told Stern that China wouldn’t consider binding targets until China had finished industrializing. Why would Paris change that?
Stern hoped that rising expectations of collective climate action would force China to change course. This was a treasure-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow level of fantasy. As Britain’s Pete Betts told the FT in 2023, “nobody criticizes the [climate] pledges unless they’re made by developed countries.” Stern himself acknowledges that Xi, having said in 2021 that China would strictly limit its increase in coal consumption, abruptly changed course in 2022 and launched a massive investment in new coal-fired capacity.
The Paris climate regime is not multilateralism in action, as Stern suggests. It is a hybrid form of synchronized unilateralism. Under Paris, each country does climate its own way. Although the text of the Paris agreement planes down the firewall, the real world took little notice. In the eight years from the Paris agreement to 2023, the West cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 1,705 million tonnes a year, while the rest of the world increased their emissions by 4,082 million tonnes a year, with China accounting for almost exactly half that increase. For every tonne of carbon dioxide cut by the West, the rest of the world emitted an additional 2.4 tonnes, with China accounting for 1.2 tonnes of that increase. Stern’s bet that the Chinese Communist Party could be guilt-tripped into acting against what it believes is in China’s interests was not only absurd ex ante. It has been disproved by what China actually does.
Stern’s Paris bet comes with strings attached. Article 4.3 of the Paris agreement provides for a legally binding ratchet, so that each party’s successive nationally determined contribution “will represent a progression beyond the Party’s then current nationally determined contribution and reflect its highest possible ambition.” Differentiation between developed and developing countries is carried over in Article 4.4 and its expectation that developed countries should continue to take the lead “by undertaking economy-wide absolute emission reduction targets. Developing country Parties should continue enhancing their mitigation efforts.”
The practical effect of these, combined with the first round of nationally determined contributions, is a binding treaty mechanism for the unilateral decarbonization of the West, with profound implications for geopolitics and the global balance of power. For Stern, geopolitics is a complication on the path of global decarbonization. This highlights the incompatible worldviews of the Obama and Trump administrations. For the former, the world is a dangerous place because of climate change. For the Trump administration, the world is a dangerous place because there are bad actors in the world hostile to America.
“No balance of power among nations will hold,” President Obama asserted in his first address to the UN General Assembly, so the United States took an eight-year holiday from geopolitics. Geopolitics did not reciprocate. The Syrian chemical weapons redline crossed, an emboldened Iran, the collapse of American power in the Middle East, Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea and his invasion of eastern Ukraine—many of the reasons that the world is a dangerous place today have their origins in the passivity of the Obama years.
The Obama administration’s dismissal of geopolitics is reflected in Stern’s account. He does not mention the Chinese Communist Party’s Marxism-Leninism, which is not only a totalitarian ideology but one that, according to the former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, views Washington as its “principal contradiction” in the world and the United States as its ideological and strategic adversary. Stern hears Xi repeatedly talk of a “new model of major power relations,” which he thinks means Xi’s desire for “a harmonious approach between the United States and China rather than the United States trying to prevent China’s rise.” Very different was the warning given to President Trump by his second National Security Advisor, H. R. McMaster, that endorsing Xi’s new model formulation would be taken as American acceptance of Chinese hegemony in Asia.
The Paris agreement came into force on November 4, 2016. Four days later, Donald Trump was elected president on a promise to withdraw from the agreement. In addition to its damaging geopolitical consequences of hollowing out the West’s economies, the scope and implications of honoring the obligations in the agreement raise profound issues of democratic legitimacy.
“The United States is still the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world,” Stern writes, as if that’s against the intent of the Paris agreement. This pits the Paris agreement against Trump’s doctrine of energy dominance of “unleashing abundant energy resources stimulates our economy.” In his supposedly “fact-free” Rose Garden speech, President Trump declared: “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” Thanks to fracking—a word also missing from Stern’s book—Pennsylvania is the nation’s top producer of natural gas after Texas, transforming its economy, forcing Kamala Harris to drop her opposition to fracking and helping Donald Trump to a 120,400-vote margin over Harris in the presidential election.
No other democracy takes treaty undertakings as seriously as does the United States and has an equivalent of the Constitution’s treaty clause on obtaining the Senate’s advice and consent. A key parameter for negotiating the Paris agreement was not sending it to the Senate. Stern interprets this as whether “a given obligation can be fairly construed as an extension of provisions in an agreement already approved by the Senate—such as the 1992 Framework Convention.” When the Foreign Relations Committee reported the UNFCCC out of committee, it memorialized the executive branch’s commitment: “[A] decision by the Conference of the Parties [to the UNFCCC] to adopt targets and timetables would have to be submitted to the Senate for its advice and consent before the United States could deposit its instruments of ratification for such an agreement.”
Unlike the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris agreement does not contain mandatory targets and timetables. Instead, there is a mechanism for developed countries to produce their own targets and timetables. Once submitted, that country is on a legally binding ratchet with no end date, irrespective of what other countries do or the trajectory of global emissions. Targets and timetables are determined at one remove, obviating the need for consideration by the Senate. Is this fair play or sleight of hand?
During the negotiations, Stern often prayed in aid a straight-faced test. The ambition and reach of the Paris agreement are more far-reaching and intrusive than the Kyoto Protocol. Those who think that the net zero transition is too hard should recall the response to Covid, Stern suggests. “No one would have imagined, before the pandemic, that leaders would shut down entire cities of five to ten million people virtually overnight. How could that be done? What about the economy? What about the backlash? It would have seemed absurd. Until it didn’t.”
There was fanfare, but no debate or scrutiny, when, on September 3, 2016, the Obama administration and China jointly deposited their instruments of ratification to the Paris agreement. “We may see this as the moment that we finally decided to save the planet,” President Obama declared. It was a done deal, until nine months later, when President Trump gave notice of the U.S. intention to withdraw, later reversed within hours of Joe Biden’s inauguration as president. If, as President Obama claims, the Paris agreement is a pivotal moment in world history, then bypassing the Senate can hardly be said to meet Stern’s straight-faced test.
When the time comes for the second Trump administration to consider the Paris agreement, its aim should be to put an end to the Paris agreement in/out ping-pong. That’s vital if the Trump administration wants to give a lead to America’s friends and allies. The Paris agreement is a disastrously one-sided agreement not only for the United States but also for the West as a whole.
Countries that might be having second thoughts about the immense damage that net zero climate policies are doing to their economies should be encouraged to follow the United States out of the Paris agreement. They are less likely to do so if the U.S. can rejoin at the stroke of a president’s pen. One way of achieving a definitive exit would be to do what President Obama did not: send the agreement to the Senate. In dangerous times, peace through strength demands economic strength—and that means rejecting net zero and the Paris agreement in toto.
Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClearFoundation and author of The Age of Error: Net Zero and the Destruction of the West (Encounter Books, 2025).
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
Related
