The ‘Climate Crisis’ Fades Out
The 2015 Paris Agreement aspired to “reduce the risks and impacts of climate change” by eliminating greenhouse-gas emissions in the latter half of this century. The centerpiece of the strategy was a global transition to low-emission energy systems. After nearly a decade, it’s timely to ask how that energy transition is progressing and how it might fare in the future. A useful framework for that assessment is the “issue attention cycle” described in 1972 by Brookings Institution economist Anthony Downs. The five phases of that cycle mark the rise, peak, and decline in public salience of major environmental (and other) problems. It’s spooky to see how closely the energy transition has so far followed Downs’s description. During Phase I, the issue of “global warming” bubbled among climate scientists through the 1980s with little public attention. Phase II began about 35 years ago when the issue—eventually rebranded “climate change”—burst into public consciousness, with global media coverage growing tenfold over the past two decades. Those years were marked by a fervor for doing something to “solve” the problem. But the significant global emissions reductions envisioned in Paris are now a fantasy. Emissions grew to an all-time high in 2023, with consumption of coal, oil and natural gas each near record levels, driven in large part by the energy needs of the developing world. Despite global renewable-energy investment of almost $12 trillion in the nine years ending in 2023, fossil fuels continue to provide about 80% of the world’s energy. The latest United Nations emissions report projects that emissions in 2030 will be almost twice as high as a level compatible with the Paris aspiration. The challenges in reducing emissions have long been evident to the few who cared to understand demographics, economics and energy technologies. As more people have come to appreciate those factors, there are signs that the “climate crisis” has entered Downs’s Phase III, when ambitious goals collide with techno-economic realities.
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