{"id":180007,"date":"2025-12-12T09:57:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T09:57:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/180007\/"},"modified":"2025-12-12T09:57:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T09:57:07","slug":"paris-agreement-turns-10-move-over-greta-china-now-calls-the-shots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/180007\/","title":{"rendered":"Paris Agreement turns 10: Move over Greta, China now calls the shots"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Paris Agreement<\/a>, signed on this day in 2015, thrust the global climate crisis into the public consciousness. Three years later, a 15-year-old Greta Thunberg began a solitary school strike that snowballed, swiftly turning her into the climate movement\u2019s defining figure.<\/p>\n

By 2019, she was scolding world leaders at the UN for talking big but doing little: \u201cHow dare you?\u201d<\/p>\n

The accord turns ten today, just weeks after Thunberg and her allies marked the thirtieth annual \u201cCOP\u201d summit by dyeing parts of Venice\u2019s canals fluorescent green and staging a mock funeral for climate action.<\/p>\n

The Swedish activist,\u00a0who has more recently trained her fire on Middle Eastern causes,\u00a0has one thing right: the era of \u201cdollhouse\u201d performative climate negotiations watched zealously by the global activist community is over.<\/p>\n

A decade of manoeuvring shaped by cold, hard economic self-interest looms. COP30 \u2013 where the EU came away largely empty-handed and with a painful<\/a> reminder that the global winds were no longer at the old world\u2019s back \u2013 was only a taste of what\u2019s to come.<\/p>\n

Ten more years<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout the US \u2026 we stood alone with a few Western allies \u2026 too few of the most vulnerable countries in the Global South joined our alliance,\u201d Lars Aagaard, Denmark\u2019s climate minister and co-chair of the talks, said on Thursday.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf this is what the next ten years will be like, I, personally, think the EU will need to consider a new way forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gathered in a freezing cold room in a remote corner of the European Parliament building in Brussels, accompanied by the chirping of a defective air conditioning unit that evoked birdsong, the architects of the 2015 deal gathered to chart that course.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe good thing about the Paris Agreement is that everybody sees it as their own,\u201d said Laurence Tubiana, who helped design the accord for France and now oversees billions in philanthropic funding as CEO of the European Climate Foundation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the best solution \u2026 because then there is real ownership,\u201d she said, addressing a sparse audience \u2013 a sign that global climate negotiations are no longer the draw they once were.<\/p>\n

Still, a climate-friendly world is far more imaginable than in 2015. Then, detractors claimed a net-zero trajectory required a return to cave-dwelling. Today, renewables make up 50% of the EU\u2019s power mix, and heat pumps<\/a> and EVs<\/a> are competitive technologies rather than fringe alternatives.<\/p>\n

Slow progress<\/p>\n

Bas Eickhout, co-leader of the Greens group, argued that the Paris Agreement had shifted the world from trajectories implying more than 4\u00b0C warming to roughly 2.5\u00b0C. \u201cBut let\u2019s be honest: there has not been much progress since Glasgow [COP26 in 2021],\u201d he said. \u201cI think this is a big concern.\u201d<\/p>\n

Teresa Ribera \u2013 the EU\u2019s most senior socialist, a Commission vice-president and its competition czar \u2013 voiced a sentiment increasingly present at successive UN climate summits.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of you were participating in the Bel\u00e9m COP and there was this sentiment: what is this exercise for, how can the COPs evolve,\u201d the Spanish former environment minister said. The broader question, she added, was \u201cto what extent is the Paris Agreement, and the capacity of the multilateral agenda to deliver, still alive?\u201d<\/p>\n

Vive Paris!<\/p>\n

Yet, Ribera and other EU officials caution against prematurely discarding the Paris framework. The answer is, she suggested, more than one would assume.<\/p>\n

The need for reform \u201cis not as strong as it used to be,\u201d with the Paris deal \u201cproviding this general framing, regulatory conditions that allow all of us to work.\u201d The annual climate jamborees provided space to \u201cassess, take away and provide orientation.\u201d<\/p>\n

That could be read as an acceptance that COPs, once relied on by activists to jolt an indifferent political class into action, have morphed into something akin to collective therapy sessions \u2013 a place to take stock while real policy choices unfold elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Others are more blunt. \u201cWe need to insist that the Paris Agreement has to deliver mitigation. Otherwise, it will not matter,\u201d said Denmark\u2019s Aagaard, whose country has long been a member of the bloc\u2019s most ambitious climate coalition.<\/p>\n

The Paris Agreement, he said, \u201chas to show that it can be a framework for action, and not an excuse for inaction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfriended<\/p>\n

Tubiana\u2019s prescription for Europe \u2013 increasingly struggling<\/a> to balance China\u2019s expanding global footprint \u2013 is a shift in diplomatic strategy.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do think the system we have \u2013 with MoCA [a meeting where government ministers discuss climate action], the Petersberg Dialogue [ditto, in Berlin], and the Danish meeting [an annual summit in Copenhagen] \u2013 hasn\u2019t delivered what we need,\u201d the French economist said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want to be undiplomatic but in this new, very fragmented context, maybe we need other formulas,\u201d she added. \u201cI think a European diplomacy using the member states and all these levels could be very, very useful.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cFinally, we need friends. We didn\u2019t have so many friends in Bel\u00e9m, that\u2019s for sure,\u201d the architect of the Paris Agreement said. \u201cWe could have many more, but we need \u2026 to not patronise any more.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are not the example that everybody should follow,\u201d she told the audience in Brussels. \u201cUnderstanding the political economy on the other side \u2026 is important.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

(rh, cz)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Paris Agreement, signed on this day in 2015, thrust the global climate crisis into the public consciousness.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":180008,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[273,111,139,69,147],"class_list":{"0":"post-180007","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-new-zealand","10":"tag-newzealand","11":"tag-nz","12":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180007\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/180008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}