The mood in Paris was jubilant. As the gavel fell and cheers rang out in a plywood meeting hall in a Paris suburb, a new international agreement to limit climate change came into existence. Champagne corks popped. That night, floodlights bathed the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe in green.

The startling thing to realise is that the Paris Agreement on Climate Change will soon be a decade old. As its 10th birthday approaches in 2025, we confront stark realities, far removed from the hopes of that joyous day in Paris. The goals of the agreement — to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial temperature, and to “pursue efforts” to limit warming to 1.5°C — are hanging by a thread. The global temperature continues to increase relentlessly. As we recounted elsewhere in this report, emissions have not even started to fall; they rose in 2023 and are forecast to do so again in 2024. The devastating effects of the climate crisis — more powerful storms, more intense heat waves, greater stress on water supplies, melting ice and rising seas — are coming faster than scientists had forecast.

Only a radical increase in global ambition can save the Paris goals from failure. Soon, countries will get their chance to deliver such ambition.

New national climate plans are due to be made public in early 2025 and adopted late in the year. This means the critical decisions about what they will contain are being made now. The main conference in 2025 will take place in Belém, the gateway to the Brazilian Amazon; it will be both the 30th global negotiating session under the United Nations climate treaty and the ninth since the Paris Agreement was adopted.

An intensive focus on saving the world’s tropical forests and savannahs is expected at the Belém conference, but equally important will be the ratification of the national climate plans. They are voluntary, but countries have agreed that collectively, they should add up to a credible effort to keep the Paris goals alive. It remains to be seen how ambitious the plans will really be, as well as how generous the rich countries will be in aiding poor countries that cannot do enough on their own.

In other words: a decade on, is the spirit of Paris still alive?

The need for countries to come together to ramp up their climate goals coincides, unfortunately, with rising global tensions. The entire international system that has prevailed since the end of World War II is under strain. The trading framework that opened borders to the flow of goods, and created rising prosperity for billions in the last half of the 20^th century, is verging on collapse. Under the pressure of populist politics, countries are thumbing their noses at institutions they helped to create, like the World Trade Organisation. They are imposing steep tariffs on each other’s goods in an ominous echo of the trade wars that broke out during the Great Depression, helping to prolong it and setting the stage for war.

Tensions over trade have large implications for the energy transition. The international trade in low-emissions technologies is critical to rapid progress, and the destabilisation of the trading system is thus a major risk. China is the world’s most important manufacturer of advanced batteries; it is the only country able to refine some critical minerals; and it is by far the largest producer of solar panels, electric cars, electric buses and electric scooters. It is installing more renewable power than the rest of the world combined, and as a result, may reach peak emissions years earlier than expected, possibly within the next year or two. The brightest spot of the energy transition — the tremendous fall in the cost of solar panels — can be laid at China’s feet, with a big boost from Germany, which created the first large market for the panels.

Yet China’s return to an aggressive form of authoritarianism under Xi Jinping has put it at loggerheads with many of its trading partners. China’s military adventurism, its threats to invade Taiwan, its support for Russia in the Ukraine war, its theft of technology from other countries, its repression of the Uyghur ethnic group and other factors are leading to something like a new Cold War between China and the West. 

We very much fear that elements of the energy transition could get caught in the crossfire. To some degree it has already happened. The American government, which claims on the one hand to want speed in cutting emissions, has imposed 100 percent tariffs on Chinese-made electric cars, essentially keeping these highly affordable models off the American market. In late August, the Canadian government followed suit with its own 100 percent tariffs. European countries have imposed tariffs as high as 36 percent on electric cars from China, up from their previous tariffs of 10 percent. Both the United States and Europe have put heavy tariffs on Chinese solar panels, even though their domestic manufacturers cannot make them at anywhere near the cost that Chinese factories can. 

We understand the political imperatives behind many of these actions. The great trade liberalisation of the 20^th century was carried out with insufficient attention to the plight of workers whose factories and jobs were being displaced — one of the factors that helped create a political opening for right-wing populists across the democratic world. Mainstream politicians are fending off the populist threat in part by abandoning their commitment to open trade.

They are also using public money to try to conjure new, domestic industries into existence. To a degree we could not have imagined just a few years ago, it seems to be working. Many thousands of jobs are being created in new American battery and car factories, for example.

Plans are far advanced to manufacture advanced microchips in the United States, clawing some elements of that critical industry back from Asia. New mines and metal refineries are under development in both Europe and the United States.

If the Chinese, offended by these muscular industrial policies, were to declare an embargo on all shipments of battery technology to the United States and Europe, the manufacture of electric cars in those regions would all but shut down. The Chinese dominance in other technologies, like solar panels and electrolysers for hydrogen production, will be difficult to dislodge. Embargoes on such products would be costly for China itself, throwing millions of people out of work, but if war were to break out between China and the West, trade would be the first casualty.

We need international cooperation, not hostility, for another big reason. Some of the emissions declines that have occurred in rich countries are an illusion — in effect, they have outsourced some of their emissions to China, Vietnam or a handful of other rising manufacturing powers. The map below shows how the ‘embedded emissions’ from manufactured goods would change the emissions picture if they were fully taken into account. All countries, both importers and exporters, have a shared interest in finding ways to cut the emissions from manufacturing. That seems likely to happen only in a world characterised by international cooperation, not open hostility and trade wars.

So far, the leaders of the world’s democracies have managed to hold right-wing populists at bay, more or less. But if the climate crisis is allowed to continue getting worse — with food shortages, unbearable heat waves, and outbreaks of disease sending millions of new refugees streaming across the borders of wealthier countries — what then? We have learned in recent years that demagogues exist in every country, and they are eager to gain power by scapegoating refugees. This is one reason, among many, that the effort to ramp up global ambition and limit climate damage has become so important.

As climate delegates battle over clauses and phrases and numbers in the next 18 months, much more will be at stake than words on a page.