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At a joint press conference in front of the Constitutional Court in Jongno-gu, Seoul, South Korea, on August 29, 2024, youth climate litigants and citizen groups involved in climate lawsuits chant slogans emphasizing that the court ruling marks not the end, but the beginning of climate action. The Constitutional Court rules that the failure to set carbon emission reduction targets for the period from 2031 to 2049 is unconstitutional and orders the government to enact alternative legislation by February 2026.
South Korea’s climate verdict: A catalyst for worldwide legal action
South Korea’s constitutional court has ruled that the country’s climate change measures are insufficient for protecting the rights of citizens, particularly those of future generations. On Thursday, it ordered the government to go back to the drawing board to set more ambitious — and legally binding — carbon-reduction targets for 2031 and beyond.
The ruling was based on a case involving 250 plaintiffs — one-third of them children or teenagers — upset by the absence of legally binding greenhouse gas emission targets. The court agreed with them and said the lack of targets beyond 2030 shifted an undue burden onto future generations.
“Environmental litigation is becoming a global phenomenon. A key catalyst is the UN’s 2022 resolution, which established a universal right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment,” says Franck Gbaguidi, director of global sustainability at Eurasia Group. “It has given more power to existing climate laws and made it easier to take legal action against environmental harm without necessarily needing to prove specific harm to health, life, or property.”
This ruling is the first of its kind in Asia, but it is “expected to trigger a domino effect across Asia, where many similar cases are in the works,” says Gbaguidi. It comes on the heels of similar rulings in Germany, Switzerland, India, and Montana that governments have a constitutional responsibility to their citizens, current and future, to combat climate change.
“We’re now entering an era of intense legal scrutiny on environmental policies, making it more likely for these cases to succeed,” says Gbaguidi. “This means we’ll see more strategic and sophisticated lawsuits against governments and companies, with courtrooms becoming key battlegrounds for climate change action.”Floodwaters cover a parking lot on the Yantic River after heavy rains in Norwichtown, Connecticut, U.S., January 10, 2024.
The rising costs of “once-in-a-thousand-years” floods
Last weekend, rainfall in the northeast caused heavy flooding in parts of the United States and Canada as the region experienced yet another wave of unprecedented flooding.
On Monday, the governor of Connecticutdeclared a state of emergency as officials began cleanup efforts. The flooding killed two residents and hundreds were evacuated. The floods also affected parts of New York and grounded flights at JFK, Newark, and LaGuardia.
Just outside Toronto, the city of Mississauga set a rainfallrecord with 5 inches of rain falling and flooding streets.
The cost of the flooding is still being tallied, but it’s going to be expensive. In July, a flood in Toronto that saw four inches fall led to insureddamages of more than CA$1 billion. According to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, severe weather events last year cost insurers over $3 billion, with year-over-year costs trending up, with billions more ininfrastructure damage.
In the US, the costs are even higher. The Joint Economic Committeeestimates that floods alone cost the country between $180 and $496 billion each year, including infrastructure costs to keep up with floods, which run into the tens of billions yearly on the low end.
Climate change is set to continue to drive up costs as extreme weather events become more frequent and damaging, putting stress on insurance rates, public coffers, and the accuracy of calling these increasingly common events “uncommon.”
The world is an inkblot
In 1921, a Swiss psychologist spent months carefully crafting a series of seemingly random blots of ink. When he was done, he arranged them in a set of 10 for publication.
He had discovered that different people saw different things in the inkblots and that this could tell him a lot about their mental state, their concerns, and their worldview.
I thought of Dr. Rorschach and his now-famous inkblots this week as I leafed through a massive new study of what people in a dozen of the world’s most powerful countries – the G7 industrialized democracies, plus Brazil, China, India, and South Africa – are worried about when it comes to their security.
The survey, done by the Munich Security Conference, an annual confab of world leaders happening this week (shameless plug for our coverage of it here), indexes respondents’ levels of concern, from 1-100, about dozens of threats.
They cover everything from terrorism to technology, climate to coronavirus. Mass migration, racism, trade wars, and organized crime are all in there too, as are questions about the threats posed by specific countries: Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, the US, and the EU.
There is obviously no shortage of stimuli for the anxious these days. Major wars rage in Europe and the Middle East. Artificial intelligence warps our experiences of both work and the web more and more each day. Conflict, poverty, and climate extremes have driven the highest numbers of refugees ever from their homes. And of course, the world is slowly cooking itself while its two leading economies – and carbon emitters – warily circle each other on technology, trade, and Taiwan.
All of that, everywhere, all at once, yes.
But when people in different countries look at our little blue and brown inkblot of a world, they see very different threats and risks.
South Africans, for example, are acutely worried about energy and food shortages. Ukraine, unsurprisingly, is concerned about Russia. The climate is Brazil and India’s top concern, while Germans now wring their hands over migration and terrorism.
Those are the finer lines of the study, but what can we see in the broader blot of responses?
First, in aggregate, the things that worry most of the world most right now have to do with two things: climate change and cybersecurity, both of which are significant cross-border issues that cannot be solved by countries working alone.
Second, the roughly two billion people of India and China are surprisingly chill these days. Not a single one of the risks rises above 50 on the index for either country, with the sole exception of “climate change” notching a blasé 54 in India. In all other countries, people are far more on edge, with most risks ranging between the 50s and 70s.
Third, Russia isn’t as scary anymore. The world – but especially Europeans and Americans – is less concerned about Russia than it was in 2022. Nearly two years on from Putin’s invasion, the dreaded “Ukraine fatigue” has set in — there’s a reason Volodymyr Zelensky has been struggling to secure more aid from his two biggest backers – the US and EU.
Fourth, what moves the “Global South” is different from what concerns Europe and the US. Climate and cybersecurity figure at or near the top for both groups, but while “Russia,” “Islamic terrorism,” and “mass migration” are keeping folks up at night on both sides of the Atlantic, these concerns hardly appear at all for China, Brazil, India, and South Africa, where economic upheavals and income inequality are more pressing.
And lastly, the most powerful country on earth is a little out of touch at the moment. While Americans’ primary security concern with cyberattacks echoes broader trends, the remainder of the US top five — “political polarization,” “China,” “Russia,” and “disinformation campaigns” — are not key concerns for most other countries, particularly in the Global South. Climate change – a major issue for the rest of the world – limps in at a lowly 21st spot for the US.
To be clear, there’s nothing surprising or abnormal about different countries seeing the world in vastly different ways. In fact, it would be terrifying if 9 billion people all saw the world identically.
The problem is that so many of these key challenges — climate change, cybersecurity, migration, technology regulation — require common cause and cooperation at a time when the world’s major powers seem to be pulling away from each other.
In other words, it’s great to see different things in a given inkblot, but the inability to get on the same page about solutions is, Dr Rorschach might agree, a more dangerous pathology entirely.
Al Gore on US elections & climate change
Ian reports from the 54th World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where the theme this year is “Rebuilding Trust in a Fractured World.” And for sure, confidence in major institutions like governments, churches, and the media is at historic lows. Add to that equation a year that will test democracy like none we’ve seen—as many as 70 elections will take place around the world in 2024. None will be more watched—whether in Davos or Des Moines—than the US presidential election.
Al Gore is no stranger to contested elections, and shares his take on the current state of American politics and some positive news about the progress of climate action. The conversation touches on the most pressing topics at Davos: artificial intelligence, climate change, and deep concerns about the 2024 US election and American democracy.
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
Participants enter the Dubai Exhibition Centre during the COP28, UN Climate Change Conference.
Can climate activism and AI coexist?
AI is on the lips of climate-policy negotiators gathered for the United Nation’s COP28 conference in Dubai, and for good reason — it presents a high-risk but potentially high-reward scenario.
The upside: AI has the potential to supercharge efforts to find real climate solutions. For example, scientists can send AI-powered robots to collect data in the Arctic and other challenging environs, and the technology can also be used to improve forecasting for extreme weather and climate-related disasters. On an even more basic level, it can be used to maximize the efficiency of all kinds of systems and reduce their carbon footprint.
But there’s a big catch: AI is an energy-guzzler. One analysis found that AI systems worldwide could consume 85 to 134 terawatt-hours per year — equivalent to the electricity diet of Argentina or the Netherlands. That’d be good for half a percent of the world’s energy consumption. (This analysis is based on the sale of popular servers from US chipmaker NVIDIA, used by much of the AI market.)
At COP28, government and industry leaders made bold announcements. Boston Consulting Group said AI could reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 5-10% by 2023. Meanwhile, the UN announced a deal with Microsoft to use AI to track countries' carbon-reduction promises.
Is the risk worth the reward? “Whether you like it or not,” says Shari Friedman, managing director for climate and sustainability at Eurasia Group, “AI is here to stay, so the job of humans will be to use it for the best purpose possible and maximize clean energy on the back end.”
In this photo illustration, the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference COP28 UAE logo is seen on a smartphone screen.
COP28’s challenge: growing problems, shrinking credibility
As 60,000 delegates gather today in Dubai for the opening of COP28, scant progress on longstanding climate goals and an emerging scandal over the fossil fuel industry’s influence over the UN climate conference is undermining COP’s credibility.
On the eve of the summit, leaked documents suggested that the UAE, a major oil producer which is hosting the summit, has been using the occasion to press for oil deals. Talk about foxes in the hen house ...
What’s more, the heads of the world’s two largest and most polluting economies won’t even be there: US President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping are skipping the event altogether.
So what’s on the agenda? One major aim is finding money for the so-called “loss and damages fund” that delegates agreed to create last year.
By 2030, the fund is meant to disburse $100 billion to help developing countries recover from climate-related disasters and adapt to a worsening trend of climate change that they themselves played almost no role in bringing about.
But so far the fund has been hamstrung by disagreements about how much major polluters like the US, EU, India, and China should have to contribute – the Chinese and Indians don’t want to put up nearly as much money as other major polluters. There’s also no agreement about how quickly to phase out fossil fuels. The US and EU want to move more quickly on those phaseouts than many emerging market countries in Asia and Latin America are comfortable with.
But it’s not all bad COP, there’s some good COP too. All the major players appear ready to commit to tripling renewable energy capacity worldwide by 2030, for example. An agreement to triple nuclear power capacity by 2050 also appears promising, though some EU member states, like Germany, are likely to object.
And some important topics are new to the agenda, including addressing growing water scarcity and finding ways to balance the needs of food production with emissions reduction (also the focus of this week’s GZERO Live event “High and Dry: Tackling Global Water Stress”). That’s good news according to Shari Friedman, Eurasia Group’s managing director for climate and sustainability.
“If you approach climate separate from water, separate from agriculture, separate from biodiversity,” she warns. “You end up creating problems that then you have to fix later.”
Still, the biggest challenge for COP28 is about something bigger than any one policy area: More than a quarter of a century after the first COP was held in Berlin, does the UN-backed climate agenda still have credibility?
The world is making agonizingly slow progress on carbon emission reductions, and its targets to reach net zero emissions by 2050 will require changes so large as to be unrealistic.
For more on what to expect from COP28, don’t miss our interview with Eurasia Group Vice Chairman Gerald Butts, who was a part of Canada’s delegation when the Paris Agreement was adopted at COP21 in 2015.
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Who should pay to fix our warming planet?
Global leaders are gathering in Dubai for COP28, the 28th annual United Nations climate summit, starting tomorrow through Dec. 12. But before the meeting even begins, I can already tell you one thing: Just like every COP that came before it, COP28 will fail to resolve the central debate on “solving” climate change.
At the heart of this failure lies a trillion-dollar roadblock: disagreement between developed and developing countries over who’s to blame for the problem – and who should foot the bill to fix it. The US and Europe blame Chinese and Indian coal plants and call for their immediate phase-down. China and developing countries blame the West’s historical emissions and insist on compensation for their mitigation and adaptation efforts. Africans and Indians assert their right to develop their economies as Westerners did. Vulnerable nations demand reparations to cope with the harmful consequences of the global warming that’s already baked in. Neither side wants to make concessions.
While they bicker, the planet is cooking. Cumulative emissions since 1850 – when humans started burning fossil fuels at scale – have already caused global temperatures to increase by about 1.2 degrees Celsius relative to preindustrial levels. Scientists believe we have nearly reached the point where limiting the planet’s temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius (and therefore the most extreme consequences of climate change) becomes physically – not just politically or economically – impossible. 2023 will be the hottest year on record, and climate-related extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, and heat waves are becoming more frequent and deadlier.
The good news is that we’re already moving in the right direction thanks to technological advancement, demographic changes, and market and geopolitical incentives. Looking out two or three generations from now, the global energy complex will be almost entirely post-carbon: renewable, cheap, decentralized, and abundant.
The bad news is that decarbonization is not happening fast enough to get there sooner. And unless developed and developing nations can bridge the climate finance gap, the path to global warming below 2 degrees Celsius – let alone 1.5 degrees, the current goal – will remain out of grasp. This puts the debate over equity and burden-sharing squarely at the heart of the planet’s ability to curb climate change.
So, who’s right? Who’s wrong? And what will it take to break the stalemate?
Climate justice by the numbers
Carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere. Unlike shorter-lived greenhouse gases such as methane, CO2 doesn’t go away – at least not on a human timescale. This means that all the carbon that we’ve pumped into the air in the past is still heating the planet today and will continue to do so in the future. And because CO2 is a “well-mixed” gas, it doesn’t matter where or by whom it is emitted. Whether caused by an LA traffic jam in 1999 or a Mongolian coal plant last Tuesday, it’s all the same to the atmosphere – and it’s all still up there.
In total, we have released roughly 2,500 gigatons of CO2 (GtCO2) into the atmosphere, mostly in the last 40 years. The United States is responsible for about 25% of cumulative emissions, while Europe (the 27 members of the European Union plus the United Kingdom) contributed 22%. China comes in third with nearly 15% of historical emissions. Many of today’s largest emitters such as India and Brazil have not contributed significantly to global cumulative emissions, with 3% and 1%, respectively. The whole African continent is responsible for less than 3% of historical emissions.
Adjusting for population size, the US has burned almost eight times more carbon per capita than China and over 25 times more than India. This makes it clear that Americans (and, to a lesser extent, other Westerners) are disproportionately responsible for causing climate change.
But while the US is historically responsible for more global warming than any other country, it is no longer the world’s largest polluter. China surpassed it in 2006, and its annual emissions are now more than double America’s and over one-quarter of the global total. India will pass the EU in the short term and the US in the medium term. And even as emissions in the industrialized world have been declining for over a decade, they are still growing in developing countries, which account for two-thirds of global emissions.
Yes, the average American still burns more than twice as much carbon as the average Chinese and 10 times as much as the average Indian. That’s pretty unfair. Not only did rich countries get rich by burning fossil fuels – we are also able to maintain living standards other countries can’t even dream of by continuing to burn much more than them. But just as the atmosphere doesn’t care about where or when carbon gets burned, it also doesn’t care about fairness.
‘Fair’ is off the table
In order to have an even chance of staying below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, scientists estimate that cumulative CO2 emissions cannot exceed 2,900 GtCO2. That’s our carbon budget. The problem is we’ve already used up most of it, meaning global emissions would have to go down by 43% by 2030 to stay on budget – a nearly 10% reduction every year from now until then (for reference, the COVID-19 pandemic caused only a 6% reduction in global emissions in 2020).
Putting aside the question of whether this is even physically possible, who should bear the brunt of this burden?
The obvious answer is developed countries. Most developing countries are well within their fair share of the carbon budget relative to their population size. Conversely, the US and other wealthy nations have long since exceeded their fair share, such that even if they reach net zero by 2050 (a big if), their emissions will still overshoot their fair share by three or four times. In fact, Americans used up their fair share of the carbon budget in 1944 (!). Whatever little budget space remains belongs entirely to developing nations.
Beyond the fact that they’ve been living on borrowed emissions since D-Day, there’s another compelling reason why rich countries should be expected to do more than poorer nations to curb climate change: They can. Developed nations are, well, developed, so they have more than enough resources to meet their citizens’ needs already (even if these are unevenly distributed). That means that they can afford to engage in aggressive decarbonization without compromising their economic development. By contrast, for developing countries, paying for decarbonization out-of-pocket at the needed pace would require condemning much of their population to poverty.
Expecting wealthy nations to take on more than poor ones is not just about retribution, then. It’s also about not depriving billions of people of the right to develop – a right that industrialized countries exercise to this day. Had rich countries not emitted (so much) more than their share, developing nations would have plenty of room left to develop like industrialized nations did.
What it’ll take
Unless scientists figure out a way to suck carbon out of the air at scale, the only way that the world can ever reach net zero is if all countries – poor and rich alike – reach net zero. Forget right and wrong – that’s simple math.
So, to answer the earlier question: Should developing nations pay for the sins of much wealthier countries? Absolutely not. Must they? Barring a breakthrough in negative emissions technologies, unfortunately yes. They cannot pursue the fossil-fueled path to development rich countries enjoyed and keep the planet from warming much further.
But for developing nations to ever agree to get on board with the program, industrialized countries will first have to credibly commit to doing four things in return. First, accelerate their own decarbonization to maximize the carbon budget available to the rest of the world. Second, invest whatever it takes to develop and deploy technologies that exponentially reduce the cost of decarbonization abroad. Third, aggressively fund the large upfront costs of decarbonization and adaptation in developing countries. And fourth, compensate vulnerable nations for the losses and damages they’re already experiencing due to climate change they didn’t cause.
Mustering the political will to make these things happen in wealthy nations is a huge challenge. We have consistently failed to meet our 2009 promise to shuttle $100 billion a year in climate finance to the developing world by 2020, a puny amount compared to the estimated $1 trillion price tag to decarbonize emerging economies. We are also still off-track to meet our own decarbonization goals. If we want developing countries to pony up, there can be no more empty promises and unmet pledges.
Unless we’re willing to put our money where our mouths are, we’re going to see not 1.5 C warming, not even 2 C, but rather closer to the 2.7 C the planet is currently on pace for – not an existential scenario for life on Earth, but certainly a life-changing one for billions of people around the world and especially in the Global South. We need to do better.
A person walks past a "#COP28" sign in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Controversies at COP28 and the future of climate change
Global climate talks are kicking off at COP28 on Thursday amid revelations that its host, the United Arab Emirates, is using the event to lobby for fossil fuel production. On the one hand, no one is surprised. Climate activists were already outraged and suspicious that one of the world’s largest oil and gas producers was hosting a meeting meant to move the world away from their production. On the other, as scientists uncover that climate change is progressing faster than expected, are the few global institutions meant to be speeding up our transition to carbon neutrality actually working against it?
For answers, we looked to Eurasia Group Vice Chairman Gerald Butts, who was a part of Canada’s delegation when the Paris Agreement was adopted at COP21 in 2015.
What was the Paris Agreement, and what has been your experience of COP meetings in the past?
Gerald Butts: The Paris Agreement was really about countries agreeing to take their own path to a common outcome. Every COP since then has been an attempt to fill in the blanks of how different countries are going to get to [carbon neutral] and serves as a reporting and accountability mechanism of how much progress each country has made.
I think that from a big-picture dynamic, the really hard issues still haven't been settled. Like, what is the role of oil and gas in a net zero world and in a decarbonized energy system? Like, who is going to pay for all of the negative consequences? Or, who is going to pay for poorer countries to be able to absorb the most negative consequences of climate change?
Those three big issues that haven't been sorted. And they're kind of coming to a head for obvious reasons because a country whose economy is dominated by oil and gas is hosting COP for the first time.
Speaking of which, what do you think of the recent revelations that the UAE is using the event to prompt fossil fuel negotiations?
I think actually the story is kind of a Rorschach test. The people who had always been suspicious of the UAE's motives for wanting to host COP will point to it and say, “Aha, that's what we were suspicious of!” And on the other hand, the UAE will say, “Well, we're an oil and gas producer, of course, we're going to try and sign oil and gas contracts.”
And that just kind of makes the point of the ... dare I say it, GULF between one side and the other. The UAE doesn't see anything wrong with what it's doing. While advocates for more rapid decarbonization see everything wrong with what the UAE is doing.
And we're kind of coming to a head here. The International Energy Agency released a really important report last week on the role that oil and gas can play in the transition. And it rightly rendered a judgment that oil and gas has been an impediment to decarbonization rather than a facilitator of it. And we're long past the day where you can say one thing and do another.
And whether from that report or in your own opinion, do you see a role for oil and gas in the decarbonization transition?
I see a theoretical one for sure. I mean, I think that an enormous amount of capital from the existing energy system has been absorbed by existing providers of energy and that if they were to deploy that capital to expedite decarbonization, that would be positive. In a nutshell, that's what the IEA's 150-page report says, if I can summarize it. But when you look at the balance sheets of these companies, what they're actually deploying capital to do, it's not that, it's to develop oil and gas.
Keeping on this subject, do you think revelations like these [about the UAE] hurt the momentum of the climate change movement? You said we're at a breaking point at this controversial COP28. What do you think the effects are going to be?
I always think it's a good thing when hard questions get clearly put on the table. And that's what's happening here. I think it'll feel like a setback in the short term, but it's actually a good thing that we're talking about real things at COP.
I think the next big COP will be, not next year, but the year after that, when Brazil will be hosting. Constructing a positive path between this COP and the Brazil COP30 will be a really important thing for the future of COP.
Some say that progressive candidates haven't proven they can win by pushing an aggressive climate change agenda. Do you think this is a problem? How could climate change become a more winning campaign platform for progressive candidates?
Butts: Well, I wouldn't agree with that assessment, actually. I think there are lots of examples of successful candidates who ran on aggressive climate agendas — Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron.
I think the challenge is this inflationary environment is really bad for incumbents. It's coincidental that a lot of those incumbents tend to be pro-climate forward, so to speak. But inflation doesn't discriminate against governments of any ideological stripe. It's just really bad if you're in power when it happens.
You’ve said that you remain optimistic about climate because the youth around the globe will vote or push their leaders to act in their best interests. I wonder if we will be given enough time to do that when you read about climate change progressing faster than anyone thought.
I think that's still true, actually. I think the people that are being hurt most by the inflation environment are homeowners, right? There are people who have mortgages. Sadly for your generation, you haven't been able to break into that market en masse yet. Which may turn out to be in the short term, a good thing, right, that you're not going to be trying to scramble to find 30 to 40% more of your monthly budget to pay your mortgage.
But I think in the short term, it's going to be hard because people are going to be focused on, short term, keeping their heads above water. Not long-term about keeping everybody's heads above water.
What do you think of President Joe Biden skipping this year's COP to focus on the Middle East and the upcoming election?
I think it's a bit of a sign that he thinks that this COP is not something he wants his brand associated with. I think that says a lot about the dynamic that we talked about 10 minutes ago. The United States this year will break a record for oil and gas production, but at the same time, they've got the most aggressive climate legislation in the history of the United States and one of the most aggressive anywhere in the world.
So they're trying to ride two horses. It's a domestic example of the global problem that the time for riding two horses is coming to an end.
I think if this COP was in Brazil, he'd be there.