The time to talk the talk on global climate is over; it’s now time to walk the walk, Jonathan Pershing, U.S. special envoy for climate change, said Wednesday at the Going Green Conference hosted by the European Commission in Washington, D.C. “We have seen in some sense the end of one era, the era of a negotiation, and the beginning of a new era, the era of implementation,” Pershing said.
Moving into the era of implementation will be a transition, Pershing explained, as the players that successfully developed the Paris Agreement in December will not necessarily be the same players who deliver on its commitments. “While there was an enormous parallel process underway in France which brought together cities, and states, and the private sector, and civil society, very few of them were inside the room negotiating the text. That’s not really a surprise, but the question now is how do we bring those people into the process because that’s where the majority of that change will have to occur,” Pershing said.
Action on the subnational front is already underway. Numerous cities and states have made their own commitments to address climate change. In September, the state of California pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, while Connecticut committed to cutting GHG emissions 80 percent below 2001 levels by 2050. The cities of Atlanta, Boston, Seattle, and Los Angeles also made commitments at that time.
Pershing noted that several states, including Colorado, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Delaware, have announced their intention to continue working toward compliance with Environmental Protection Agency regulations on carbon pollution regardless of the current Supreme Court stay of the Clean Power Plan. That kind of above and beyond action will advance the climate agenda, he suggested.
Another important player in the implementation of the Paris Agreement will be the private sector, Pershing said. “What happened in Paris was the generation of a new [market] signal, the sense that the market is now on notice. They paid attention. There are profits here. There’s a cost to inaction and governments will be watching and requiring aggressive effort, in that context, this steady drumbeat I think will continue to go forward,” he said.
The private sector does indeed seem to have taken notice. On Wednesday, the Science Based Targets initiative, a partnership between the Carbon Disclosure Project, U.N. Global Compact, World Resources Institute, and World Wildlife Fund, announced that more than 150 businesses had signed its commitment to set emissions reduction targets in-line with the global effort to keep warming well below 2 degrees Celsius. Notable business participating in the initiative include Coca-Cola, Dell, General Mills, Sony, and Kellogg.