Do high-stakes international negotiations work?
What does a very smart and committed person like Bill Gates think about them? In the upcoming Paris UN Climate Change Conference in December 2015 member states are expected to achieve consensus–even though major breakthroughs are not guaranteed–on a path forward to address this challenge facing the global commons.
Here is what Gates said an interview today in The Atlantic:
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: An Interview with Bill Gates on the Future of Energy – The Atlantic
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