The Paris Agreement was a fantasy Climate catastrophism has backfired

Remember the Paris Agreement? Signed a decade ago today, it was hailed as a historic milestone in the fight against climate change, with practically every country promising drastic action to keep global warming below 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels. And, at the time, the stakes couldn’t have felt higher. As Western politicians and activists endlessly warned, unless carbon emissions were urgently and drastically reduced by 2030, climate change would have apocalyptic consequences, potentially extinguishing humanity — if not all life on Earth.

For a time, climate seemed to dominate. Terms such as Net Zero, carbon footprint and green transition became fixtures of national and global politics. More than that, they justified a sweeping range of measures, from carbon taxes to fuel levies, and helped fuel a new wave of climate activism personified by Greta Thunberg. But then, almost as quickly as it appeared, the climate crisis faded, overshadowed by more short-term emergencies.

The pandemic shifted the focus from “saving the planet” to “saving lives”. The war in Ukraine was about energy security, not decarbonization. The carnage in Gaza, trade wars and, most recently, the Iran conflict, further crowded out climate angst. Trump’s second withdrawal from the Agreement, upon taking office for his second term, barely even registered. And when COP30 closed in Brazil earlier this year, familiar calls to end fossil fuels were met with public indifference.

Ten years on, then, one cannot help but ask: did the Paris Agreement, and the broader UN Conference of the Parties (COP) process, actually achieve anything? The record is damning. Global fossil CO2 emissions are roughly 5% higher today than at the moment Paris was signed. The 2024 rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 was the largest ever recorded. Meanwhile, national emissions-reduction plans are projected to deliver only a 12% cut in global emissions by 2035, against the 60% reduction (relative to 2019 levels) that scientists say is needed to honor the Agreement’s targets.

There is one significant nuance: the rate of emissions growth has decelerated sharply. Climate advocates point to this as evidence that Paris produced a genuine change in direction. Yet as skeptics rightly note, the absolute level of emissions has continued to rise, while the deceleration owes at least as much to cheap renewables and structural economic shifts as to the Agreement itself. In a sense, both observations are true. But what’s not in dispute is the gap between ambition and outcome.

How one interprets this failure depends on your perspective. Climate activists see it as a tragedy — proof that we are sleepwalking into catastrophe precisely as political commitment to climate action wanes. Climate skeptics, on the other hand, see it as a non-issue: the “energy transition” is quietly being dropped from the political agenda, and good riddance. In truth, both positions are wrong, albeit for different reasons.

The activists, for their part, are wrong to maintain that civilization-ending consequences are locked in unless emissions reach net zero by 2030 — a claim that’s both scientifically dubious and politically counterproductive. Not only do rising temperatures not necessarily entail mass death, but, as Albert Hirschman observed in The Rhetoric of Reaction, doomsday narratives tend to induce fatalism rather than action. If disaster is inevitable, the rational response is to stop bothering. The climate movement’s relentless escalation of apocalyptic language has almost certainly accelerated its own decline.

But the skeptics are wrong to dismiss the energy transition altogether. For countries that lack abundant domestic fossil fuel reserves, reducing dependence on imported hydrocarbons is not an act of idealism — it’s a matter of hard-nosed national interest. The current geopolitical turbulence has clearly driven this message home, with energy import dependence becoming an acute economic and strategic liability. Europe’s exposure to the Iran conflict, and the broader volatility of global energy markets in recent years, illustrates the cost of building an entire industrial model based around imported fossil fuels, especially ones hailing from halfway around the world.

The reason both sides misread the issue — and the reason the climate agenda largely failed — lies in how the entire debate was framed from the outset. Since its origins at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, COP has been defined by two inseparable characteristics: catastrophism and globalism.

The catastrophism has deep roots. The Limits to Growth, a 1972 report commissioned by an Italian nonprofit, introduced the idea that humanity itself must be restrained for the planet’s survival. The First Global Revolution, its 1991 sequel, made this agenda explicit. “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill… The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.” From that point on, environmentalism ceased to be a movement for the rational management of resources, becoming instead a project of planetary governance, one that treats humanity as both cause and culprit. Policies framed exclusively in terms of sacrifice — more expensive energy, higher taxes, restricted mobility — predictably alienated the very public whose buy-in was essential.

The globalism was equally damaging. By framing climate change as a planetary problem, one requiring planetary governance, COP foreclosed more practical, interest-based approaches to decarbonization rooted in national sovereignty. Any action taken by a single country was implicitly framed as futile; only coordinated global action counted. Moreover, the kind of state-directed industrial policies needed to actually build the infrastructure of decarbonization ran counter to the market-oriented neoliberal zeitgeist. This logic delegitimized countries such as China, which were actually investing in decarbonization through five-year plans, massive subsidies and deliberate manufacturing scale-up rather than multilateral consensus.

This framing, however, was not simply a strategic error; it was, in part, deliberate. COP took shape precisely as globalization was being institutionally embedded: the first Rio conference in 1992 coincided with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, which marked the birth of the European Union. Arguing that democratic decision-making had to give way to technocratic governance in the name of planetary salvation served to reinforce this broader supranational project.

This globalist orientation was compounded by the ideological makeup of the climate movement itself. Stemming predominantly from liberal internationalist and pseudo-Marxist traditions, most environmental activists and writers share those traditions’ hostility to the nation-state. In their view, national sovereignty is an obstacle to be overcome by international governance. Paul G. Harris, a prominent environmental expert, wrote for instance of the “cancer of Westphalia”, the state-centric system that privileges national interests over international ones. In Harris’s telling, this framework had to be replaced by a system of international governance, for the good of the planet if nothing else. The result was predictable: more conservative and nationally oriented politicians came to associate any energy transition policy with globalism and its discontents, ensuring that the issue became entangled in culture wars and depriving it of any positive, sovereignty-affirming interpretation.

The institutional architecture reinforced the dysfunction. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, established in 1992, created a permanent negotiation apparatus, a framework for consultation rather than action. Each year, thousands of diplomats, officials and NGO representatives convene to “assess progress”; the very structure of the system ensures inertia. A vast bureaucratic ecosystem — UN agencies, EU directorates, NGOs, consultancies and think tanks — grew up with a material interest in perpetuating the “climate emergency”. The goal of reducing emissions became secondary to preserving the system itself, alongside the political benefits that system conferred on the elites who managed it — including all manner of authoritarian fantasies.

These dynamics explain not only the Agreement’s failure on its own terms, but also the way in which globalist-framed “climate action” actively undermined the national interest of nation-states: including industrially advanced ones.

The European Union is the most instructive example. Over the past decade, Brussels led the global charge on climate and Net Zero. Over the past decade, indeed, the EU has expanded its renewable energy share: from 17% of gross final energy consumption in 2014 to around 25% today. But because this was driven by climate idealism rather than a coherent push for energy sovereignty, it proceeded alongside growing external fossil fuel dependency. North Sea production declined; nuclear capacity was phased out, most dramatically in Germany; natural gas was treated as the indispensable “bridging” fuel for an intermittent-renewables grid. The paradoxical result was that the EU’s overall energy import dependency actually increased — from around 54% of gross available energy in 2014 to 58% today, with a peak of 63% in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. All that despite a sharp drop in energy consumption, largely driven by stagnating economic conditions.

Until 2022, however, Europe could at least rely on relatively cheap, and reliable, Russian gas. Since then, it has substituted it with far more expensive and volatile American LNG, on which it is now heavily dependent. The Iran conflict has exposed what this means in practice: Europe remains among the regions most exposed to energy-price spikes and supply-chain disruptions.

The energy transition has now largely disappeared from Europe’s political agenda: but not because climate idealism has been replaced by clear-eyed geopolitical thinking. Rather, it is because a policy so thoroughly divorced from Europe’s strategic interests has left the continent without the institutional capacity to think strategically at all. A return to genuine geopolitical realism would be welcome; indeed, it is the only context in which a rational energy transition could be pursued.

To understand what that would look like, it’s instructive to examine the country that has taken the most coherent alternative approach: China. In recent years, the People’s Republic’s investment in renewable energy has dwarfed that of every other country. In 2024, it spent over $800 billion on its energy transition, more than double any other economy and equivalent to 31% of the world’s total clean energy investment. Just that year, more wind turbines and solar panels were installed in China than in the rest of the world combined. It did so quietly, without grand proclamations and without tiresome moralizing. Crucially, it did all this not to “save the planet” but for reasons of hard national interest.

As Professor Warwick Powell from the Queensland University of Technology explains, the key analytical concept here is something called “Energy Return on Energy Invested” (EROEI): the ratio of energy produced to the energy required to produce it. High-EROEI systems generate surpluses that can be reinvested into the economy; low-EROEI systems drain it. Historically, fossil fuels offered EROEIs of 50:1, or even 100:1 in the early decades of Middle Eastern extraction. Those days are over. Shale oil and tar sands offer returns as low as 3:1 to 5:1 — barely above breakeven when system costs are included. Conversely, modern onshore wind can deliver EROEIs of up to 50:1; utility-scale solar now achieves 10:1 to 30:1 and falling. In short, the economic logic is increasingly stark.

The broader point is that China’s focus on renewables is not merely about electrification; it is electrification in the service of energy sovereignty. By increasing the share of domestically produced, high-EROEI energy into its supply mix, Beijing reduces its dependence on volatile foreign supply chains, insulates itself from outside shocks in oil and gas markets, and bolsters its net energy surplus per unit of investment. The results are clear: despite massively increasing its energy consumption over the past decade, China’s overall energy import dependency has held stable at around 20% — and the disruption caused by the conflict in Iran has left it largely unscathed.

In conclusion, the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement should be neither an occasion for mourning nor for celebration, but for clear analysis. The Agreement failed on its own terms, largely because it was structured to fail: it was embedded in a globalist institutional architecture opposed to national-interest reasoning and was promoted through apocalyptic narratives that generated fatalism instead of action. What it leaves behind is not a legacy of climate governance but an object lesson in how not to organize.

All the same, the energy transition is far from over — and it need not be driven by climate idealism to be worth pursuing. For any country serious about sovereignty, security and long-term economic resilience, the case for reducing fossil fuel import dependence remains a strong and entirely self-interested one. The question now is whether Western governments can shed the ideological baggage of the COP era and embrace a national-interest approach to the energy transition, one that simultaneously draws on renewables, domestic resources, nuclear energy and the most rational import sources available. So far, the signs are not encouraging.

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