Discussion keeps the world.
Hello, welcome to Roundtable where we serve up piping hot debates on the issues that sizzle in China and beyond.
I'm Niu Honglin.
Ten years after COP21, the Paris Agreement stands at the most widely endorsed climate treaty in history, covering nearly 200 nations and introducing a governance model built on reiterative ambition.
Its design from nationally determined contributions to the global stock.
Take reoriented climate politics toward transparency, accountability and long-term structural change.
As the world confronts worming trends, competing energy priorities and unresolved finance battles, the agreement's 10th anniversary provides an analytical window into both its achievements and its limits.
For today's show.
We take a look at the past route we've taken and discuss where to go in the future.
For this episode, I'm joined by Yushan and Steve Hatherly.
Now grab your virtual compass and follow us to the heart of the discussion.
Ten years ago, in December 2015, the world put off something remarkable.
Nearly every country signed onto the Paris Agreement, the single most influential climate deal of our time.
And today, December 12th, marks its 10th anniversary.
For many people, the paris agreement sounds like distant policy or diplomacy, but over the past decade it has quietly reshaped daily life, from how your electricity is generated to the codes running in your computer.
So what exactly is this agreement?
What happened in the decade that followed, and how has it changed the world we live in?
To answer these questions, i have to give a little bit more information.
Here in beijing, where we go live, that is, we just welcomed our first snow in this winter and we've got to the yes snow alert and a lot of different types of weather alert, and we discussed before the show in our little roundtable team that we are getting more and more different types of weather alert and telling us the different types of situation.
And even that is related to the Paris Agreement that a lot of countries signed and decided to pay more attention on weather, on climate, on a relationship between human and the nature.
So at, well, the same time, 10 years ago, what happened?
What happened was that the Paris Agreement existed.
And when we talk about Paris Agreement, it sounds like a big word.
It sounds like the key word, or rather the parameter that people mention every time when the topic of or discussions over climate change is mentioned.
So basically, you can think of it as the world's big climate pact, a legally binding promise under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that almost every country on Earth has signed into, signed onto, rather.
It was hammered out back in 2015 at COP21 in Paris, thus the name Paris Agreement and it officially entered into force less than a year after.
Today, nearly 200 countries are part of it.
Basically, the whole planet, like I said, is agreeing to take climate change seriously.
Yeah, it's basically the entire world.
And the agreement sets out what they want in terms of goals.
And they have three long-term goals.
One is temperature-based.
We hear this all the time.
They want to limit global temperature, rise to well below 2 degrees.
Ideally, the number is 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
That's what they call the global speed limit.
Beyond that, they talk about adaptation, where they want to increase resilience and adaptive capacity to climate impacts.
They want to help communities cope with the changes that we can no longer prevent.
In simpler terms, adaptation.
The goal of adaptation means building up methods and also infrastructure that are able to sustain a changing climate.
And it could refer to developing and growing heat or pest-resistant plants, or building or renovating houses that can live through record-breaking rainfalls or temperatures, or an early warning system to tell the public about an upcoming natural disaster or weather alerts, like you said.
That's the second one.
And then finally, the third one is finance.
And this is a big one.
They want to ensure trillions of dollars is available for green transition flow to the right places.
So when you put these three objectives together, it reflects a big change, a big shift in the global climate politics.
And that's what they want all countries to try to follow.
That's kind of the road map.
Yes.
With this roadmap, different countries would have their own ways to get there, their own strategies to try to fill in in this map and make sure that the goals are achieved.
And those are the NDC mechanism and global stock take.
So the NDC mechanism is the nationally determined contribution.
We hear this word also quite often, for example, in different We hear they sometimes would update their nationally determined contribution and they would bring new ones based on the situation and adjust to the current one.
Yeah, they have to do that.
Yes, they have to do that every five years.
That's when they have to update their targets.
Yes.
And when it comes to the global stock take, that is, the GST.
The agreement also established this enhanced transparency framework.
Every five years again also every five years, the world undergoes a global stock take and assessment of collective progress, figuring out whether or not we are making proper and also reasonable progress in dealing with all the issues and in achieving the three objectives.
So back in 2023, they checked in on that 15 degrees Celsius goal and they found at that time that they were not on track.
But by checking in every five years.
This forces accountabilities for all of the countries that have agreed to this.
Yes.
And all of these mechanisms, the cycles of checking is part of this aggressive ambition that, every few years, these respective countries need to grow into stronger plans while fulfilling previous ones.
So this is really a continuous growth, constant growing up, leveling up of ambition and also promise to the rest of the world.
But 10 years after the signing of the paris agreement, we have to admit different countries are facing different challenges.
They are working towards that goal, or even just studying that goal, in different ways, and we even have different understandings about specific requirements in achieving these kind of objectives.
And there are different types of conflicts, different understanding or different research results.
And that is kind of the, well, what happened after the agreement was adopted.
Yeah, because afterwards, for the previous decade, it was basically everybody negotiating, sitting up in meeting rooms for hours figuring out just what's the next step.
What's the real rule book here for how this thing could actually work for everybody?
How do we put it into action?
Who pays for what?
How do we make sure countries are playing by the same rules?
And all of that took years and they only wrapped up most of it at COP29 in Azerbaijan in 2024, which just happened last year.
So the past 10 years have been marked by continuous debates, And every discussion point sparked pushback and plenty of doubts, like you said Honglin, and raising a lot of different conflicts.
For example, the role of fossil fuels is one major one that's discussed worldwide, pointing out to the question should the world face fossil fuel out completely or just face them down slowly?
Some countries, like those in the EU and many small island nations, such as Barbados or the coastal regions.
They want a clear commitment to end fossil fuel use, because their very survival depends on keeping global warming low.
But other countries like India, or oil-producing nations in the Gulf region like Saudi Arabia, the UAE.
They argue that they still need oil and gas because it's vital for their economics and development.
Which is also a hard fact.
Yeah because, if you think about this developed nations they've built their wealth over centuries by burning fossil fuels coal and oil and gas.
But developing countries, still developing countries.
They're now being asked to skip over that carbon-intensive phase entirely.
And to grow their own economies or to lift their citizens out of poverty and build infrastructure and provide electricity.
That takes a massive amount of energy.
And the cheapest and most reliable or readily available, I should say options are often fossil fuels.
So to ask those countries to switch from fossil fuels, which is more cost effective for them, to renewables, which is really capital intensive.
It takes over the long term, you're going to save more money.
But in the startups, you're spending a ton, a ton of capital there.
And this is a huge burden for developing countries, because they don't get that same advantage of having centuries of developing time burning fossil fuels that those other developed countries have.
Yes, and developing countries are definitely thinking about the issue because they need to prioritize their development right and also with the fact that they're facing climate crisis as well.
But it's not only developing countries.
Recently, the president of the united states unveiled a department of transportation proposal to weaken fuel economy standards for cars and trucks, and the plan would scrap rules that require cars to get 504 mpg by model year 2031 and replacing them with standards that only require a fuel or a fleet-wide average fuel economy of 345 mpg.
And that is not the only uh policy they're rolling out.
This june also, president trump signed a joint resolution from congress aimed at preventing california from implementing its rules to phase out gasoline-powered vehicles as well, so no longer having incentives for evs and eliminated long-standing fines for automakers that file to complain with uh complying with fuel economy standards.
And these are also happening in developed countries as well.
Different countries have different situations, but these incidents shows that um or if these kind of policy issuing show that we are not entirely on the same page.
Well, and that's reflected in the agreement because, in the Paris Agreement context, climate change yeah, it's a global problem and every nation has to contribute to the solution.
But developed countries should take the lead in reducing emissions and providing the money needed and the tech needed and the support needed to developing nations.
Because the reason, I think, is pretty clear developed countries.
They emitted most of the greenhouse gases historically speaking And that's driving the cause to today's climate problems.
So they are behind it a little bit more, but also they're more resourceful in dealing with it.
That's reflected in the agreement.
Yes.
And that is also the reason that developed countries are asked to take the lead in reducing emissions and providing finance, technology and support to developing ones.
And the climate finance is another issue that is being discussed today.
People are talking about who pays it, how much and how to deliver and all these objectives and where should these money go?
This is another major issue that we've been talking about for the past decade.
Yeah, it goes back to one principle called common but differentiated responsibilities, or rather CBDR.
It basically means that everyone is working toward the same climate goal, but not everyone is expected to do the same amount.
Yeah, others have more in terms of obligations than some do.
There's something called the $100 billion gap, and this is where developed countries promised.
It happened in Copenhagen back in 2009 and reaffirmed in Paris years later to provide 100 billion per year by the year 2020 to developing nations for climate action.
We talked about the reasons why.
Money is a huge obstacle for developing nations.
But that promise was not fulfilled on time and it's also been a major source of mistrust between developed and developing countries in some instances.
So there's a big money issue there.
Yeah, and you mentioned the US just now, Hong Lin, which kind of brings up a curious historical walkthrough, if I may, which is the US jumping in and out of the Paris Agreement for actually several times, first joining under Obama, then pulling out under Trump, then rejoining under Biden, followed by a second withdrawal earlier this year under the Trump administration.
So, in a way, the back and forth demonstrated both the fragility and the strength of a global climate cooperation.
So for the rest of the world.
It was a reminder that the expectation that we mentioned earlier for those who contributed more and have more capacity should do more in this scenario.
This expectation isn't always met in reality.
But in the meantime, it also proves something important to us too.
So for that, the Paris Agreement is resilient.
Because during the years the U.S. was out, in and out, other countries, we still remained in.
We stayed in, pushed ahead, and kept the system alive until today.
We talked about the bigger picture.
It's quite essential to understand the history behind it, to understand what happened during the past 10 years and what are still continuing to be the issue that we discussed.
We didn't really land on a conclusion just yet.
We're still debating, still negotiating, but...
At the end of the day, all of us on the negotiating table, we are trying to make it towards a better future, to the building of a society that can happily and harmoniously coexist with nature.
And there is some good news.
This is from The Guardian from just a couple of days ago.
Because it is the anniversary.
If you go online, you'll see numerous media outlets talking about this issue.
And one of the points that jumped out to me was the link between economic growth and carbon emissions.
And they thought for a long time that that was a very rigid link.
And according to a study that came out recently, that link is getting weaker.
The analysis talks about the effectiveness of strong governments' climate policies, and They refer to it as a decoupling trend that has accelerated since 2015, and it's becoming particularly pronounced among major emitters in the global south.
So countries representing 92 of the global economy have now decoupled consumption-based carbon emissions and GDP expansion.
According to the report, this report was from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit.
And what they did was they found that, according to global carbon budget data, the decoupling is now the norm across advanced economies, with 46 of global GDP in countries that have expanded their economies while cutting emissions.
And that includes Brazil and Colombia and Egypt and other countries too.
That decoupling means and the link that I referred to before.
The assumption was when your GDP grows, your carbon emissions are going to grow as well.
But for some countries they're seeing that decoupling where it's not happening, and China is a great example of that.
Yes, and I was about to say that I'm not entirely surprised by that good news.
That's because in our daily lives, we can observe these kind of phenomenon.
During this past year, we traveled to different places, and some of those places are not the first time that we visited and we realized something.
That is, comparing the situation on the road to the situation several years ago, when we maybe the last time visited those areas, including Xizang, including Xinjiang, including a lot of different places is that you notice the increasing numbers of new energy vehicles on the road, the kind of charging poles and the talking about.
Building a new energy-related plantation in the region and the fact that they're changing their main source of energy to clean energy.
That is one very important and quite significant factor that we see in all these places around China.
Yeah, at least here in China.
You mentioned NDV and that's a very major or if not primal drive or motor where we're going green.
So we mentioned in earlier shows as well.
In this year it was reported by the official that for the first time ever, China's new energy vehicle sales accounted for over half of all nationwide emissions.
New car sales in October this year, proving that our market is at that time and is ready to receive the NEV for it to exceed half of the car sale capacity here, at least here in China.
And another example would be the solar power, which is another very good example, which is that over the past decade, the price of solar models fell by nearly 90 percent, driven by large-scale manufacturing, particularly here in China, and steady improvements are also in efficiency as well.
Yeah, you'll see now here in the country these large-scale solar farms that are feeding into the grid.
There are also rooftop solar panels that allow households and also small businesses to make and create their own electricity, and that makes it a reality clean power for millions of people here.
Yes, and that's not the only thing.
In our life, we are gradually changing our perception over what's better, what is a better choice.
I remember once talking on Roundtable about young people would choose a greener option even with a small margin of increase in the price when they're purchasing.
And that is not that.
Just among the younger generation, I think, public awareness about the fact that we need to go a bit greener, not because we want to save the nature or the planet.
They'll be fine.
It's us human beings that might face the problem if the climate continues to well.
I'm going to.
The worst direction comes out in the news all the time about how young people, in their buying trends, want to know the source, love what they're buying and they want to know where it comes from.
They also want to know what the company stands for, the who's creating this product that I'm about to purchase.
I'm about to hand my money over to someone.
Who are they?
What did they make and how did they make it?
It's really quite a responsible and mature decision-making process.
Yeah, and this whole growing awareness also kind of influenced part of the society out of our expectations, which is in the banks.
The financial has also recognized climate change as a systematic risk and a massive investment opportunity for many us coming out the carbon market that's very popular here in china and worldwide too.
So yeah banks, um i i think not the easiest line to draw between a and b, climate change and banks what's the connection there?
But they've become increasingly incorporated into their, or incorporated sustainability into how they operate, how they lend their investment decisions, and that pressure from the financial system which is, of course, driven by the Paris goal of aligning capital.
It's essentially kind of rewiring the global economy.
And now investments that prefer eco-friendly RD projects, for example.
Those can fundamentally be tilted in the direction of an industry.
So therefore, there's incentive from the industry side, too, in dealing with the banks.
And for companies which comes down to a smaller scale.
As we try to focus on zoom in a little bit, it's now very difficult for individual companies and businesses to not incorporate sustainability in their development goal.
So one 2024 survey by KPMG found that 95 of the world's top 2250 companies now publish explicit carbon reduction targets, and let it out there for the public to know just how many carbon emissions they reduced from the last year.
And that's also marking up from 80% in 2022, comparing with the data in 2024.
So individual-wise, we're on the larger scale-wise, on the national-wise, people are doing things and we're gaining awareness regarding what Paris Agreement bring to the world.
That being said, on Roundtable we talk about how China has done a lot to go greener in industries, in the society.
We sort our garbages even in the smallest unit of a residential community area.
We turn to new energy when it comes to the source of all kinds of industries.
Yes, we've done a lot.
Worldwide, different countries are struggling with different problems, and they all we have all made progress, but that is not as enough as we expected, isn't it?
It's still.
We are not hitting the 15, not even hitting the 2 degrees Celsius raising of temperature.
We are still facing a lot of disasters and natural disasters happening having something to do with climate change, which is also the reason that many scientists are talking about adaptation instead of just combating climate change.
Again, it's not all doom and gloom, though.
This is from climateanalytics.org.
So back around the time that the Paris Agreement was signed, fossil fuels still attracted more investments than renewables.
By 2023 though, each dollar going into fossil fuels was matched by about 170 for clean energy, which is good.
And today, clean technologies attract over $2 trillion a year.
That's around double the fossil fuel investment.
And this is Paris Agreement in action.
This is kind of a long-term signal that's helping to pull money.
It's pulling the right money, the right capital into clean technology and away from fossil fuels.
Yes, of course.
And here in China we have the carbon neutrality plan and we are moving towards it very steadily in the right speed we anticipated and planned for.
But I still want to ask, is it enough?
Is all this enough?
What is the road ahead?
What are some areas that we should work harder in?
What are some realities we should accept and maybe make compromises in setting the goals and making the plans.
And as individual, probably there are more things that we can do.
From a Chinese perspective, I would say that When we're trying so many things, it's really important that we realize, though not every country is expected to do the same amount and meet the same goal.
It is equally important to ensure that everyone is included in this transition.
And to do that, countries like China.
We are taking the lead and we need to share what we're doing and what's working to other countries so that they can at least have a try on if it's going to work for them as well.
And we're doing that.
In 2025, and this is according to amberenergyorg.
China's clean technology exports hit record high this August.
That's reaching 20 billion U.S. dollars.
And that includes not only NEV, but also battery science and battery technology, too.
So that's something that we can do to combat the gap that's existing, still existing until this day, between all the countries out there.
Well, a decade after Paris, the world stands in a space between urgency and possibility.
The agreement didn't promise perfection, it provided a path.
And while progress has been uneven, the framework continues to remind us that climate action is neither a single pledge nor a single year, but a long collective act of staying committed to the future.
We still have the power to shape.
