BaCCC/Video Summaries/Why Politicians Have Failed to Tackle Climate Change

Video Summary

Why Politicians Have Failed to Tackle Climate Change (9:04)

In 2019, millions of climate change activists took to the streets, with their figurehead, Greta Thunberg, addressing the US Congress.
Climate change is now recognised as the defining threat facing the planet.
Since the 1980s, the environment has become a bigger and bigger part of the political agenda.
In 1997, UN members met in Kyoto to agree on specific cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. The Kyoto Protocol put constraints on industrialised economies but no constraints on developing countries.
A sound environmental policy is likely to benefit everyone, but the costs fall on particular groups, typically those that do most of the polluting.
The Paris Agreement required all countries, both developed and developing, to commit to taking on global warming, but it involved compromise.
The emissions cuts that nations promised were not enough to reach the two-degree target.
If countries ratchet up their action against climate change, it will break the 50-year cycle in which political compromises have repeatedly enabled governments to avoid taking effective action.
In that time, CO2 emissions have more than doubled, and every decade since then has been warmer than the one before.