This article by Ute Brühl and Ernst Mauritz was published on 10/09/2018 on the <link https: kurier.at wissen klimaschutz-droht-der-wichtigste-vertrag-zu-kippen external-link-new-window internal link in current>Kurier website.
After the USA, Canada and Australia could also turn away from the targets for limiting warming. Experts see risks – and opportunities.
At first glance, it looks like a snowball effect: after the <link https: kurier.at themen usa rtr-entity>USA pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, the Australians now want to follow suit. And Canada has also announced that its planned carbon dioxide tax won't be introduced to the extent originally planned.
The Paris Climate Agreement aims to limit global, human-caused warming to well below two degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels.
Is it dead now? "No," says Herbert Formayer, climatologist at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, with conviction. He sees it more as a last stand by the lobbies backing fossil fuels like coal and gas. The fact that Australia isn't pushing ahead with the technological shift has a simple reason – the country is a coal exporter and relies almost exclusively on fossil energy domestically.
Ubimet chief meteorologist Manfred Spatzierer is more pessimistic: "If Canada and Australia also turn away from the Paris Climate Agreement, that's a worrying signal. There's a real danger that further countries will follow for the sake of short-term economic gains."
"Falling behind"
The private weather service has an office in Australia, and Spatzierer knows the situation there well from regular work visits: "Australia's energy supply depends to a large extent on cheap, dirty brown coal. And Australia has always had a technological lag in energy supply." Turning away from the targets of the Climate Agreement would widen that gap further, and an urgently needed innovation boost for wind and solar energy would continue to be absent.
The fact that countries like Australia could fall behind technologically – and therefore economically – might actually be an opportunity for the climate, some experts suggest. Because it's China – the world's second-largest economy – that's now setting the standards, as Formayer explains. "The industrial metropolises there suffer from poor air quality, which is why the government is forced to take action. So now only a certain percentage of new cars with combustion engines can be registered. German car manufacturers have already tried to get Beijing to relax these regulations, because they're lagging behind in developing more environmentally friendly cars."
Some aware of the danger
The risk of falling into a technological lag is something that some in the western industrialised nations are well aware of: in the USA, California is pressing ahead with renewable energies despite Trump's U-turn.
A greater danger for the climate is looming from China's neighbour: "India is economically where China was around 40 years ago. If the economic upturn there is also driven by fossil fuels, then we really have a problem," warns Formayer.
Living in a climate-friendly way
And he calls on the western industrialised nations to step up: "Almost everyone in the world wants to emulate our lifestyle. That's why it's also our responsibility to make our lives attractive and at the same time climate-friendly."
But can that work if more and more countries are saying goodbye to the Paris Climate Agreement? "A snowball effect could of course develop," Formayer concedes. However, one advantage of the Paris Agreement is also that you can't withdraw from it all that quickly. In addition, countries have to report on what measures they've taken: "That creates pressure," the climate researcher is convinced. That pressure is probably needed for Austria too: "Because we haven't yet taken any measures to meet the climate targets."
But time is pressing: "It's already very unlikely that the two-degree target can be achieved," says Spatzierer. "And the more countries move away from the Paris Agreement, the more unlikely it becomes."
