Front Burner - How the world abandoned climate politics

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

While Donald Trump may have shocked many at the UN General Assembly when he called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”, he may just have been the most extreme messenger of a global shift being seen elsewhere. David Wallace-Wells, author of “The Uninhabitable Earth” and friend of the show, recently wrote a feature for the New York Times detailing the ways much of the world has turned away from climate politics and how the era of the Paris Agreement, which was signed 10 years ago, may be coming to an end. He talks to us about why we are seeing this shift and whether the green energy transition, led by China, is enough to make up for it. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Of the seven great nations that make up the G7, it is Canada that imposes the highest taxes on beer. 46% of what Canadians pay for beer is government taxation. When the G7 leaders get together, I bet Canada doesn't brag about that. Enough is enough. Help stop automatic beer tax hikes. Go to hereforbeer.ca and ask yourself, why does the best beer nation have the worst beer taxation? This is a CBC podcast. Hey, everybody, I'm Jamie Poisson.

Last week, Donald Trump spent a chunk of his address at the United Nations General Assembly, taking aim at the concept of climate change and efforts to address it. It's climate change. Because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, climate change. It's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.

Climate change, no matter what happens, you're involved in that. No more global warming, no more global cooling. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that of course their country's fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success. If you don't get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail. And I'm really good at predicting. While Trump's rhetoric is obviously way more inflammatory and frankly unhinged, when compared to other leaders, it's not like he's taking on a block of politicians,

steadfastly committed to tackling global warming. David Wallace Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth and Friend of the Show, recently wrote a feature for The New York Times detailing the ways much of the world has turned away from climate politics and how the era of the Paris Agreement, which was signed 10 years ago, may be coming to an end. In it, he cites energy analyst Nat Bullard, who observed that between 2019 and 2021, governments around the world added more than 300 climate adaption and mitigation policies each year. In 2024, it dropped to around 50.

So why are we seeing this shift? And is the green energy transition enough to make up for it? David's here to lay it all out for us. David, hey, it's great to have you back on the show. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. So as I mentioned in the intro there, almost 10 years ago, 195 countries signed a pledge that the Guardian at the time called the world's greatest diplomatic success.

Barack Obama, who his president said it was, the best possible shot to save the one planet we've got. What exactly did the Paris Agreement set out to do? Well, the short version is that it's set out to save the world from catastrophic warming. It committed all of those nations, every country in the UN, to limiting global temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average, and to try to get it as close to 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial average. average as was possible. Now, if you've heard about those temperature limits, you've probably

heard that there's a really big difference between them. The UN published a big report in 2018, sketching out exactly that difference, how much of a different world it would be at 1.5 degrees versus 2 degrees. And probably a lot of what you may have heard, whatever that was seven years ago now, that may have given you a sense of the apocalyptic future for the planet, it actually came out of that report, which is to say the difference, you know, two degrees was so much worse than 1.5 that when you read about it in your newspaper, listened to news about it or watched a TV news report about it, it made it seem like those gaps were really enormous, and then it was absolutely critical that we stay as close

to 1.5 as possible and avoid that 2 degree future. Now we are 10 years later, and we've actually already had a couple of years. north of 1.5 degrees. We haven't passed it in the long-term average, but on a year-by-year basis, we're already above 1.5. And it seems almost impossible for us to avoid two degrees, which means in this period of time, this 10-year period, there was at first a huge awakening of climate protest and climate politics, but we're still kind of racing past the targets that we set for ourselves 10 years ago. And I think as a result, have to have to judge that agreement as, at least in some profound ways, some important ways, a failure.

I know it was, it's supposed to be legally binding the agreement, right? But in reality, how enforceable has that been? Yeah, I mean, it depends on what you mean by legally binding. It is a, it is a document that all these countries signed on to like a treaty like any other. But there was no enforcement mechanism built into it. And there was no talk even at the time of building up any enforcement mechanism. You've heard sometimes in the years since conversations, you know, some world leaders float in the possibility of, you know, something like climate sanctions being imposed on countries that were laggards. But that was never a part of the agreement and probably the fact that it wasn't a part of the agreement was one reason it got

passed in the first place. Going back a decade, I know you've written about, how world leaders widely embrace the school at the time. And one of the reasons was this perception of climate activism as a generational uprising. Grattanberg became the face of this. You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.

Until you start focusing on what needs to be done, rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope. How did this idea of addressing climate change for the sake of our children and our grandchildren proliferate as the ultimate reason for why we should do something about climate change? Well, I think there were a lot of factors, but I think it's also undeniable if you think back to the 2019-2020 period when Greta was becoming a global icon and you also had Extinction Rebellion in the UK. Oh, my God. That's a lot of kids. You had Fridays for Future and all of these climate strikes, all of these climate protests. Across America, we have to change the world.

And around the world. And when do you want it? No. Millions walked out of classrooms today demanding action on the climate. Climate change is real. All following the lead of a shy, Swedish teenager. She started a movement when she stopped going to school on Fridays. Our house is on fire, and we should get angry.

That we were observing something that had not really been seen before. The environmental movement had had peaks of global engagement. There was one right after the kind of first climate conference in 1992. There was another in the period of an inconvenient truth in Hurricane Katrina. If you look at the 10 hottest years ever measured, they've all occurred in the last 14 years. And the hottest of all was two. But we were seeing another really big one, much larger in scale, much more global in scale, in 2019 and 2020. But I think even more than the sort of scale and intensity of those protests, even more remarkable than that, was that the world's most powerful people seem to be embracing that same protest energy.

They were the ones who were inviting Greta to Davos and to the UN. They were the ones who were inviting climate protesters to all of these, you know, to the UN General Assembly. And they themselves, when they got up and spoke about these issues, would often talk about it in explicitly existential terms. They would defend the existential language of the protesters rather than sort of try to contextualize or diminish it. This is a challenge of our collective lifetimes. I want you to stay angry. It's one minute to midnight on that doomsday clock, and we need to act now. The science is clear. We must do more and faster.

They often talked about these goals of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees as an absolute must-do global political action, not one option or one cause among many, but a paramount cause that would undermine if we failed to achieve it, undermine everything else we were trying to do. And there were a lot of reasons for that, too, the shift of global power in the direction of climate. But on some level, I think that was the most distinctive. feature of this period that followed from Paris Accords and flew into and ran into the pandemic. The protest energy was one really significant difference. But I think the attitude of the world's powerful towards climate change, towards elevating climate change, was, you know, on some level even more unusual. That truly had never happened before. Yeah, in your piece, you also write about how this was a pre-Brexit world and how we were politically at this kind of

more opportune time with the war on terror far behind us, right? Can you just elaborate on that a little bit more? Yeah, I think one of the things that reflecting on the Paris Agreement, I think brings you to is a real, at least brings me to, is a real lamentation for an era of global politics that we have left behind and which was built on the promise of future collaboration, cooperation, cooperation, mutual obligation. global solidarity, a future that seemed to promise much less poverty and possibly no poverty around the world, a much more integration of all the world's people, and a much more profound and deep sense that we were all in us together as eight or ten billion people on this one planet. You know, it wasn't just the Paris Agreement. We had the, you know, the UN had had this the millennium development goals, which it had passed in the year 2000, they were the smashing success, extreme poverty had fallen like 70%. And they followed that up with a whole new set of

goals, which were called the sustainable development goals, which, as I alluded to a second ago, you know, tried to or hope to bring about the end of extreme poverty globally, along with all of these other really ambitious measures for, you know, kind of equaling the global playing field. And 10 years later, we've made progress on almost none of those targets. And the geopolitical landscape that gave rise to them has been really, you know, damaged and deranged beyond recognition. You know, 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed, people talked about a world that was run by what they called the G2, the group of two, the U.S. and China, that this would be a partnership between the world's two great powers, tackling the world's great threats like climate change. and now where we are 10 years later in a kind of inarguable Cold War. There are many other aspects like this that you could look at in our geopolitics.

We've had a resurgence of war. With Ukraine, with Gaza, with a huge amount of unrest across the Sahel, we've had more terrorism, even though people in places like the U.S. don't often see it. Globally, that's been the case. Hunger is on the rise. Famine is on the rise. We are in a period of backsliding. And the basic, you know, kind of philosophical, social commitment that seemed to undergird this moment of great optimism and produce the possibility of something like the Paris Agreement, it now feels, to me at least, you know, like a relic of the past, which we're not going to recover really anytime soon, much to my own regret.

I just earlier this summer, the International Court of Justice ruled that climate harm violates international law, which could allow countries to sue each other for climate damages. And doesn't that seem like a promising outcome from the Paris Agreement era? Or I guess, do you see any promising outcomes from that era? Well, we'll see how it all plays out. I mean, I think in a world in which the sort of basic geopolitical order is much more scattered and diminished, undermined. On all of these fronts, you know, Trump is the most obvious assailant, but it's being picked apart, I think, in many, many ways. I don't really know what those kinds of findings portend. When I think about the way that, you know, the international community has consolidated a position on Israel's conduct in Gaza, without real consequence for Israel on the world stage, I think that's probably a better model for how we'll be dealing with climate. action or inaction going forward. There will be outrage. There will be venues to express that outrage. But whether it matters, whether there's meaningful political and legal pressure on those countries who are, you know, not fulfilling their obligations under the Paris Agreement or other climate treaties, I think is an open question. And my inclination is, at least for the time being,

the consequences will be very small. But that's not to say that in general, we have to give up on climate action and accommodate ourselves to an impossibly degraded or even apocalyptic climate future. The truth is that as we've sort of retreated from climate politics and our geopolitics has sort of deprioritized climate action from where we thought we were heading five or ten years ago, nevertheless, decarbonization, green electricity, renewables are expanding at an absolutely breathtaking pace all around the world. And that means that we may not be on a considerably worse path than we hope to be emissions-wise, even though very few people in positions of power are prioritizing climate action either on the mitigation side or the adaptation side in the way that

many people involved in the Paris Agreement might have hoped in 2015. Instead, we're sort of handing a lot of that work to the private sector, private actors, and increasingly, I think, to sort of Chinese state planning, whether we can count on that continuing and how, you know, how livable a future it brings us. It's another open question. But it's not to say that there's no movement on climate action at all. It's just that it's taking a different form without some of these commitments to, you know, mutual solidarity that we thought undergirded the whole project not that long ago. Of the seven great nations that make up the G7,

it is Canada that imposes the highest taxes on beer. 46% of what Canadians pay for beer is government taxation. When the G7 leaders get together, I bet Canada doesn't brag about that. Enough is enough. Help stop automatic beer tax hikes. Go to hereforbeer.ca. And ask yourself,

Why does the best beer nation have the worst beer taxation? Hey, how's it going? Amazing. I just finished paying off all my debt with the help of the Credit Counseling Society. Whoa, seriously? I could really use their help. It was easy. I called and spoke with a credit counselor right away. They asked me about my debt, salary, and regular expenses. Gave me a few options and helped me along the way. You had a ton of debt and you're saying Credit Counseling Society helped with all of it?

Yep, and now I can sleep better at night. Right on. When debts got you, you've got us. Give Credit Counseling Society a call today. Visit no more debts.org. I'd love to ask you what you think this all means for a middle power like Canada, right? So when our Prime Minister, Mark Carney, was elected in the spring, one of the first things that he did was he got rid of the carbon tax.

We will be eliminating the Canada fuel charge, the consumer fuel charge. immediately. This will make a difference to hard-pressed Canadians, but it is part of a much bigger set of measures that this government is taking to ensure that we fight against climate change, that our companies are competitive, and the country moves forward. So it's my honor on behalf of my colleagues to sign this order. There has been a pause on an EV mandate. The previous government put in, and the priorities of this current government have been focused on making Canada a more prominent player on the world stage on separating ourselves from the United States,

growing our economy through big nation-building projects and looking to become, in his words. And energy superpower. Pipelines are being openly discussed again. While we don't know all the details for how those goals will be balanced with environmental protections and indigenous rights, there are real concerns right now

that this government is putting not enough emphasis on the latter. Mexico, America's other neighbor, is doing similar stuff, right? Claudia Scheimamom, their president, a former climate scientist, has doubled down on this idea of energy sovereignty. She boasts about her country's oil and gas production. Are these countries backed into a corner here, or do you think that they have another choice? I think they have they have another choice. I mean, I would say, you know, in the case of Marc Carney and Canada, you know, it's especially stressful. given his past. He was, you know, a really loud, an outspoken voice for alarm around climate change and its risks to the financial system when he was, you know, as a central banker, both in Canada and in England. And some of the speeches that he gave in 2015 were actually quite critical in getting the Paris Agreement over the finish line because it kind of, they kind of helped bring in the financial community to a position of great concern about climate action.

The combination of the weight of scientific evidence and the dynamics of the financial system suggests that in the fullness of time, climate change will threaten financial resilience and longer-term prosperity. While there's still time to act, the window is finite and is closing. I think a lot of what he's done has been politically defensible. The carbon tax was not really working all that well. Some of these mandates about EVs may be better handled through the natural rhythms of market forces. Other things I have more objections to, I don't think we really want to be expanding production of oil and gas. And when I look around the world, I think I see a pretty clear picture that solar power and battery power and wind power are just running away with a competition for new energy supply. So last year, 93% of all new energy installations worldwide were renewables.

That means that for every unit of bad energy, the world is installing more than 10 of the good clean stuff. And that's just, you know, that's sort of how the world is voting across many different countries with many different energy needs and many different places on the development curve, you know, with many different market structures. overwhelmingly the, you know, the momentum is towards clean energy. Now, on some level, that makes the particular policy decisions of particular politicians a little less consequential because, you know, the direction of change is so clear. On the other hand, you know, if we're in a situation as we are now, where we're basically using renewables to add to our total energy capacity as opposed to displacing our dirty energy sources, then we're not actually making any progress on emissions. And that's where I think, you know, the loss of climate politics globally, but maybe

most vividly in the case of countries like Canada and Mexico, is really most profound. You know, we can scale up. We are now in a position where we really can scale up our green energy supply so quickly that we can use it to bring down the amount of dirty energy we're using. But that's likely only going to happen if we make policy choices to bring it about. And if we just say, let's let the market, you know, decide for us. What the market is going to decide is that we're going to slap a lot of really cheap, clean energy on top of existing dirty systems and, at least for the next few years, are not going to cut our emissions at all. You mentioned China before. And I just wonder if you could talk to me a little bit more about the role that China is playing in all of this.

This is a country that, as I understand it, has the market pretty cornered from the production of electric vehicle batteries and solar panels to the processing of rare earth minerals required to make them. And so, like, where do they fit into this picture? I mean, on some level, the whole picture. I mean, it's, yeah, I think 74% of wind and solar projects worldwide last year were Chinese. Most of that was within China, but they're doing a lot more actual built out of capacity. across the developing world, in addition to supplying things like solar panels and batteries for installation by foreign companies elsewhere. And this means that for the first time, we're seeing a really dramatic acceleration

of green electricity in poorer parts of the world that we long assumed would need a kind of philanthropic support from places like the US, Canada, Europe to get over that hump. Instead, China has managed to make this technology so cheap that. even in a place like Pakistan or across sub-Saharan Africa, it's cheap enough that people can buy those panels themselves, you know, if they're homeowners, and certainly at the scale of, you know, large-scale utilities and state-owned electricity companies can do an awful lot of green energy buildout. That is, you know, that hopeful story in which the world is adding, you know, massively more green energy than most analysts thought was possible just a few

years ago, doing so at a much cheaper rate than anybody expected just a few years ago, that hopeful story is being written almost entirely by China. And that means that there's another kind of profound reversal unfolding at the geopolitical level. You know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, the rich countries of the West would often tell themselves, okay, we're good people, we're worried about climate. But if we move quickly out of the goodness of our heart, how will that balance out, you know, the sort of bad behavior of all of these developing countries most dramatically China who was building out coal power at a kind of obscene rate in the 2000s and early 2010s. And now we're in a very different place where China's still building out

coal power plants, although they're not burning nearly as much coal as they used to. But they're also providing the world the tools that the rest of us need to decarbonize and making it possible for a country like the U.S. or a country like Pakistan to make choices on their own about how quickly to move. And unfortunately, you know, a country like the U.S., which is still the world's second largest emitter, is choosing to move much more slowly. And other countries, you know, across the world are taking a faster path. But fundamentally, we're drawing from a Chinese toolkit. And that toolkit has been made available to us because of Chinese policy, which has been directed not narrowly at cutting carbon emissions, but more broadly at building out green energy technology because they

believe it is the infrastructure of the future and that there's an advantage for them in cornering that market, which is what has happened not just because of how fast they've moved, but how slow the rest of us have moved. Listening to you talk about this shift from trying to meet certain climate targets or conserving what's left of our rainforests and oceans because it's the right thing to do to just seeing it all through a more economic green-focused lens really reminds me of something the climate activist David Suzuki said when we had him on the show recently. And I wonder if I could play you that clip and you could just react to it for me. most of human existence. We knew we were embedded in nature and depended on it. But now most of us live in big cities where our primary focuses on our jobs. We need a job to buy the things that we need. And so the economy assumes this high position and nature. We think, oh, nature's out there in

parks and so on. We never think if we don't have air for three to four minutes, we're dead. If we have to breathe polluted air perpetually, we're sick. And yet we use air, this most important sacred gift from nature as a garbage can. And we won't pay a cent. Damn it all, I will not pay a carbon tax to use air as a garbage can for our fossil fuel emissions. David, any final thoughts there? First, I would just underscore and underline everything. He said, I'm a lifelong admirer of his.

You know, he put it probably more pointedly and more sharply than I might. I would just say there's another aspect to the same phenomenon, which is that, again, if we pull back in time to 2015 and think about where we were politically and geopolitically around climate then, it was really important that we were talking about a global challenge and addressing that global challenge globally that is as part of the movement to produce the Paris Accord, which was not perfect by any stretch. Nevertheless, as part of that movement and as part of the agreement itself, there was a recognition of the obligation of someone like me, a relatively well-off person in a very rich country in the global north, to those living much more difficult lives in much more climate ravaged places around the planet. And something about that dynamic, that my life, as I understood that my normal life imposed a climate cost on people living far away from me and indeed in the relatively distant.

and future, that was part of the motivating energy and perspective, which gave rise to this agreement and everything that flowed from it. And while we're still moving at a relatively rapid pace to green our energy systems, I really fear like we've lost that core presumption, that core insight and that core promise, which people like me 10 years ago were making to people elsewhere around the world, and which whatever it would have achieved on climate terms, nevertheless pointed towards a more hopeful future in which our politics didn't need to be rivalrous and combative, and the powerful didn't need to behave sociopathically towards the least powerful, but in fact could reach out to them with open arms and offer a hand up. I really worry,

especially in a climate ravaged world, if we're not extending those hands anymore to those who are suffering, where they'll be left. And honestly, how we'll be able to live with ourselves on the other end of the bargain. David, thank you. As always, thank you. Thank you so much. Great to talk. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.