The Framework Convention on Climate Change is overseen by an organization known as the Secretariat, which is led by a Costa Rican named Christiana Figueres...

The A.D.P. subsequently split into A.D.P.-1 and A.D.P.-2, each of which held meetings of its own. The purpose of the U.N.F.C.C.C. and of the many negotiating sessions and working groups and protocols it has spun off over the years is to prevent “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” In climate circles, this is usually shortened to D.A.I. In plain English, it means global collapse.

The third COP produced the Kyoto Protocol, which, in turn, gave rise to another mandatory gathering, a MOP , or Meeting of the Parties. The seventeenth COP , which coincided with the seventh MOP , took place in South Africa. There it was decided that the work of previous COP s and MOP s had been inadequate, and a new group was formed—the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action, usually referred to as the A.D.P.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or U.N.F.C.C.C., has by now been ratified by a hundred and ninety-five countries, which, depending on how you count, represents either all the countries in the world or all the countries and then some. Every year, the treaty stipulates, the signatories have to hold a meeting—a gathering that’s known as a COP , short for Conference of the Parties.

Much of Kolbert's story is a portrait of Christiana Figueres, a mother of two with boundless energy and optimism. She also has the most thankless job in the world.

When Figueres took over the Secretariat, in 2010, there were lots of people who thought the job so thankless that it ought to be abolished. This was in the aftermath of the fifteenth COP , held in Copenhagen, which had been expected to yield a historic agreement but ended in anger and recrimination.

Let's look at Christiana's dream.

The debate over what to do—or not to do—about global warming has always been, at its core, an economic one. Since the start of the industrial revolution, growth has been accompanied—indeed, made possible—by rising emissions. Hence the reluctance of most nations to commit to cutting carbon. But what if growth and emissions could be uncoupled? In some parts of Europe, what has been called “conscious uncoupling” is already well along. Sweden, one of the few countries that tax carbon, has reduced its emissions by about twenty-three per cent in the past twenty-five years. During that same period, its economy has grown by more than fifty-five per cent. Last year, perhaps for the first time since the invention of the steam engine, global emissions remained flat even as the global economy grew, by about three per cent. Figueres maintains that global uncoupling is not only possible but obligatory. “We frankly don’t have an option,” she told me. “Because there are two things that are absolutely key to being able to feed, house, and educate the two billion more family members who will be joining us. You have to continue to grow. And, particularly, developing countries need to continue to grow. But the other sine-qua-non condition is that you can’t continue to grow greenhouse gases, because that kills the possibility of growth. So, since you have those two constant constraints—you have to grow G.D.P., but you cannot grow G.H.G.s—what option do you have?” On Figueres’s last day in New York, I arranged to meet her at her hotel, not far from the U.N. It was a purely functional place, with no lobby or bar, so we went up to an empty lounge on the top floor, where there was a microwave and a coffee machine. Figueres made herself a cup of black tea with a tea bag she’d brought from home. I’d brought along a list of questions on a piece of paper. A few minutes into our conversation, she took the paper from me and sketched out her vision of the future:



“I love this,” she said. The straight line was supposed to represent economic growth, past and future, the curved line the rise and fall of greenhouse-gas emissions. “That’s where we are,” she said, drawing a dot right at the point where the two lines were about to diverge. She gestured toward an office tower across the street: “I think you and I will be alive when that building, all of those windows, will be covered with very, very thin-film solar cells, so that the building can produce all the energy it needs and maybe more.” I asked what would happen if the emissions line did not, in fact, start to head down soon. Tears welled up in her eyes and, for a moment, she couldn’t speak.

Thus we see that Christiana's dream is identical to the dream of every other Flatlander on the planet who wants to turn this global warming thing around. It is worth noting that this dream becomes more elusive—literally—with every passing year and every new FLOP (graph sourced in link).

It might also be helpful to look at the big picture since 1980 (graph source).

I do not want to criticize Figueres here. She also said an insightful thing.

“I’m not Alice in Wonderland,” she told me, once we got upstairs. “You and I are sitting here, in this gorgeous apartment, enjoying this fantastic privilege, because of fossil fuels.” Figueres, who is separated from her husband, has two grown daughters, one of whom works in New York, the other in Panama. Her apartment is decorated with vividly colored paintings by Central American artists, and it looks directly onto the Rhine, which, on this particular evening, was untrafficked except for an occasional coal barge.

Yes.

Still, one wonders when Christiana's dream will be deemed impossible by the faithful. Probably never. Hope springs eternal. But let's change the subject. I want to talk about Elizabeth Kolbert's failure. Here's the relevant text.

To hold warming to less than two degrees Celsius, the best estimates available suggest that total emissions will have to be kept under a trillion tons of carbon. The world has already consumed around two-thirds of this budget. If current trends continue, the last third will be used up within the next few decades. What’s fundamentally at issue in Paris—although the matter is never stated this baldly, because, if it were, the conference might as well be called off—is who should be allowed to emit the tons that remain. One approach would be to assign these tons on the basis of aggregate emissions. Under this approach, very large emitters, like the United States, might not get any of the dwindling slice, on the ground that they’ve already gobbled up so much. Another way to allocate emissions would be to grant everyone on the planet an equal share of what’s left; in that case, the U.S. would still have to radically reduce its emissions, but not all the way down to zero. A third approach would be to focus on efficiency. It’s expensive to shutter power plants and factories that have already been built. But, as the cost of renewable energy declines, it may be cheaper to, say, put up solar panels than to construct a new coal plant. If growth can truly be decoupled from emissions, then poor countries shouldn’t need to burn through lots of carbon in order to become wealthy.

And that's all she says. This is very disappointing. I am reluctant to write this, but I feel like saying it.

There was a golden opportunity in this story for Kolbert to say, or merely suggest, that growth and emissions can not be decoupled, at least to the extent necessary to avoid D.A.I. (dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system). And if growth and emissions can not be decoupled in any meaningful way, then humans would be forced to talk about both variables, not just one to the total exclusion of the other.

But she did not say it, or even suggest it.

Instead, Kolbert tells us about Sweden, which has a population of 9.6 million people, which is about three-quarters of the population of the state of Pennsylvania, where I live. That's disgraceful.

Kolbert is the only mainstream writer who I've thought might have the psychological wherewithal to tell her readers the truth. I don't know her, I've never talked to her and won't reach out to her. So I don't know what she thinks privately. But that doesn't matter to me because when I say speak the truth I mean say it out loud.

As I've explained many times before, you can not have a writing gig at a place like The New Yorker and also say taboo things like decoupling growth and emissions is not going to happen. You can have one or the other. If you speak the truth, you lose the gig. If you keep the gig, you can't speak the truth. That's how Flatland works.

So speaking the truth would be career suicide for Kolbert. But what, really, is the point of telling us about Christiana's dream? There's no point to it, at least as I far as I can see. Anyone who follows these climate policy issues has read the same horseshit hundreds of times. Or, there might be a point to it, maybe, if she had questioned the dream. I think adhering to reality has inherent value, not to mention survival value. Not that this reality/fantasy distinction makes any practical difference to humans.

I once wrote "Ms. Kolbert has truly mastered the evasive non-answer to the 'end on a happy note' question." Apparently she has also mastered the evasive non-answer to the "can we fix global warming" question, which is a subject she has written about for many years now.

Here's how Kolbert ends her piece.

Then [Figueres] brightened: “You know, I think that this whole climate thing is a very interesting learning ground for humanity. I’m an anthropologist, so I look at the history of mankind. And where we are now is that we see that nations are interlinked, inextricably, and that what one does has an impact on the others. And I think this agreement in Paris is going to be the first time that nations come together in that realization. It’s not going to be the last, because as we proceed into the twenty-first century there are going to be more and more challenges that need that planetary awareness. But this is the first, and it’s actually very exciting. So I look at all of this and I go, This is so cool—to be alive right now!”

That's a standard journalism move in a personality piece, the summary quote (and optimistic note). Kolbert distances herself from Figueres' stance, but doesn't question it either. That's also standard journalistic practice. And earlier, remember, she tells us about that biomass miracle in tiny Sweden.

As I said, all this is very disappointing.