The Egypt climate conference showed progress on warming is in jeopardy

How we got here

International engagement on climate change takes place on two interacting levels. The United Nations regularly convenes world representatives to negotiate how to address the global problem, primarily through the voluntary commitments countries bring to the talks. Meantime, big players such as China, the European Union and the United States engage in separate sets of negotiations to build crucial trust that, if they act on climate, they will not do so alone.

The world landed on this bifurcated path after trying practically everything else. Negotiators attempted in 1997 to construct a treaty that would legally bind developed countries to specific emissions cuts. The United States refused to adopt the resulting Kyoto Protocol, which also left out big polluters such as China that saw it as an unacceptable surrender of their sovereignty. In the following years, some countries worked on their own or in smaller groups — most notably, the European Union — to cut their emissions. But the pace of change was slow.

So, in 2015, negotiators hashed out what is known as the Paris agreement, which did not bind countries to specific emissions quotas but created a system in which nations meet regularly, report their emissions, commit to voluntary cuts and pressure one another to do better. The Paris negotiations worked in large part because the United States and China, which together account for nearly half of the planet’s greenhouse emissions, had agreed beforehand on substantial cuts themselves, spurring broader agreement. The Paris system prescribes regular cycles of increasing ambition; last year, countries were expected to increase their emissions-cut pledges; next year, they will conduct a “stocktake,” measuring how far they have gotten.

In theory, the driver would be peer pressure: Countries would meet substantial emissions commitments to avoid being shamed at the next climate conference. In practice, critics point out, the world still lags far behind what scientists recommend. A U.N. report released last month found that there is “no credible pathway” to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), the threshold of danger scientists say humanity should not breach. Current policies imply a temperature rise on the order of 2.8 degrees Celsius, which would devastate countless ecosystems and threaten billions of people.

But before the Paris conference, the world was much further off course. Estimates of future warming ranged up to 3.5 degrees Celsius and higher. A 0.7 degree difference might not seem like much, but every tenth of a degree lower translates into incalculable amounts of suffering avoided. Last month’s U.N. report found that warming would clock in at about 2.4 degrees Celsius if countries met their current Paris agreement pledges — and 1.8 degrees Celsius if they met more ambitious longer-term goals.

It is remarkable that warming below 2 degrees Celsius is still even a possibility; coming out of Paris seven years ago, one credible estimate found that the world had only an 8 percent chance of meeting this target.

Lingering tensions

This progress came in part because climate negotiators have finessed persistent disagreements between rich and poor countries that frequently threaten to derail the U.N. process. In Egypt this year, poor countries, which bear the brunt of climate change’s effects but are responsible for practically none of the emissions causing it, pressed rich ones for compensation. Though they have a good moral and economic argument, the reality is that a climate reparations plan would be impossible to move through Congress and other developed-nation legislatures — particularly if it implied that rich countries would accept practically unlimited legal liability for climate damages abroad.

Wealthy countries are already falling short of their previous commitment to spend $100 billion yearly to help poor countries restrain their emissions and adapt to climate change. No doubt, they should spend more and leverage that money to attract private funds — for example, by investing enough in specific clean-energy projects that they attract private investors to pitch in the rest.

But the U.N. process’s success will not rest on whether it finds a neat resolution to what appears to be a for-now unresolvable dispute over who owes what to whom. It is crucial that such conflicts not derail steps toward the overriding goal: cutting the emissions that are driving the crisis. The world needs to invest about triple the amount it currently does in emissions-free energy. The U.N. process should keep its primary focus on cajoling big countries to meet their current emissions pledges and to up their ambition.

This is why perhaps the most important development in the climate fight last week might have occurred some 6,000 miles away from Egypt. President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping met face-to-face at the Group of 20 conference in Bali, Indonesia, and agreed to restart stalled U.S.-China climate talks. Among other things, this detente promises to spur work on a pact to cut emissions of methane, an extremely potent greenhouse agent.

Climate diplomacy can be stupefying — a series of conferences during which intense debates rage about the placement of commas in official documents. But the big picture, thankfully, has been one of progress — which the world should not take for granted.