The climate thresholds established in the Paris Accords are looking less and less achievable. While developed economies are reducing emissions, the rest of the industrializing world still depends upon fossil fuels to keep things moving.
Given the current state of renewable technologies, rising energy insecurity, and deglobalization, climate targets are growing increasingly difficult to achieve. Without far more extensive basic research measures, global temperatures will rise faster than previously believed.
Good morning, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from a chilly Colorado morning. And today we’re going to talk about a new report that’s come out from the UN Environmental Program, basically talking about the status of the world and complying with the Paris Accords, which was an agreement that was signed. Geez. It’s been ten years ago now under the Obama administration, to reduce global carbon emissions so that the world never slides past two degrees centigrade temperature increase. Basically, we just hit about 1.5, or we’re going to hit 1.5 in the next few years. A couple of things here.
Number one, I would argue that the Paris Accord was never going to work. Anytime you bring together countries as varied as the United States and Malawi, it’s going to be really hard to find a common ground and if you can find a common ground, you’re never going to find a matched industrial policy that achieve something like that. We have seen significant carbon reductions in a lot of the advanced world, most notably Europe and Japan. But everyone who’s trying to industrialize needs energy, and energy requires carbon. Lots of people like to talk about solar and wind, but solar in particular requires so many inputs that its mid-term carbon imprint is actually higher than what you would do with things like natural gas. Longer term it might work, but only in places where the sun is really bright. And as the Europeans have proven over and over and over and over again, most of Europe just isn’t very sunny. So getting all the transmission systems in place to bring the solar energy from where it’s sunny to where it’s not, is yet another cost and yet another delay. And ten years on, the effort to do that has been pretty low. The bigger problem, of course, is that if you want the developing world that is industrializing to have low carbon energy. You got to pay for it. And really, you need to develop a new technology first. That is lower carbon in the first place. And that still hasn’t been done so anything like the Paris Accords. That doesn’t come with a couple trillion dollars for basic research. I’ve always been dubious. So that’s kind of collectively piece one. We just don’t have the technology that’s necessary in most places to make this work. And places where it does work in Europe are because they’re deindustrializing, which means they’re just using less energy anyway. Okay. Lots of caveats in that, obviously.
Second problem that is significantly worse is that in any world where hyper globalization is not a factor, you’re looking at the world kicking out more carbon. Because if you start breaking down normal trade lines, then people have to make do with what is local. For supply chains, for things like solar and wind and batteries, that means you just can’t make them, because solar specifically is the second most complicated supply chain in the world after high end semiconductors, with thousands of steps that touches dozens of countries. You just can’t make them at all in a world that is not fully integrated. But a bigger problem is that when you have conflicts like what’s going on with Ukraine, like what’s going on with Iran, you disrupt the flow of the low carbon fossil fuels like oil and natural gas. The Greens like to talk about oil and natural gas as the big boogeyman, but they’re really nowhere near the worst. Because once a country gets a taste of electricity, they will do pretty much anything in order to keep that electricity. And if and natural gas become interrupted, they will use other sources of energy in order to get the power. And oil and natural gas are generally traded internationally. But lots of countries have deposits of things like coal at home or very close. And not just any coal, lignite, which is about 20% water by weight and is the highest carbon output fossil fuel. Or even worse, wood, which kicks out more carbon than even lignite. So what we have seen in calendar year 2026 is a lot of countries, for energy security reasons, stopping to import oil or liquefied natural gas from, say, the Persian Gulf or wherever else has gotten so expensive, and turning to local fuel supplies. And so of course, the carbon output has gone up.
So at the time that I looked at this for the first time in a really, really deep way, it was when I wrote the book, the End of the World Is Just the Beginning. That book came out in 2022. At that point, the global civilization had already gone up 1.1 degrees from the baseline at the beginning of the industrial age, 1.1°C. We’re now around 1.2-1.3, and we’re probably going to hit 1.5, assuming no significant changes in 2030 to 2035. That was an assessment, that was before the events of calendar year 2026. We’re probably now going to hit that at least a couple of years early. And as you break down globalization moving forward, we’re going to skid right by that two degree number that the Paris Accords wanted to hold it at. And we’re going to go and skid right by three and four as well. And by the end of the century, we need to be starting to consider things like five and maybe even six. So whatever your views are on climate change, I don’t much care. It’s real. And a lot of the things that we have to deal with it just don’t work yet. And the mitigation that we’re going to have to do in 10, 20, 30 years is really going to be extreme. So, you know, buckle up.
