What Lies Beneath - George Monbiot

George Monbiot.

Do they understand what they have signed? Plainly they do not. Governments like ours, now ratifying the Paris agreement on climate change, haven’t the faintest idea what it means. Either that, or they have no intention of honouring it.

For the first time, we can see the numbers on which the agreement depends, and their logic is inescapable. Governments can either meet their international commitments or allow the prospecting and development of new fossil fuel reserves. They cannot do both.

The Paris agreement, struck by 200 nations in December, pledged to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels”, and aspired to limit it to 1.5°. So what does this mean? Thanks to a report by Oil Change International, we can now answer this question with a degree of precision.

Read this latest piece by Guardian columnist George Monbiot - “What Lies Beneath.”