When the world convenes in the United Arab Emirates later this month for the next round of the endless climate slog, much attention will be paid to the pledges of individual nations to cut their emissions. This has been the basic scorecard of climate talks almost since the start. But it’s a wildly incomplete scorecard, in ways that are becoming ever clearer as we enter the endgame of the energy transition. We’ve been measuring it wrong.
That’s because a country’s exports of fossil fuel don’t count against its total. But it’s those exports that are driving fossil fuel expansion around the world, coming as they do from some of the most diplomatically powerful and wealthy nations on Earth.
To give the most obvious, and largest, example: the United States is, fitfully, cutting back on its carbon emissions; its envoys will be…
Read the full article originally published at e360.yale.edu.