A Brief Sociological Analysis of The 2018 Climate Change Agreement

Last Updated on December 31, 2018 by Karl Thompson

The 2018 United Nations climate summit ended with a new pact among 196 countries to curb global warming which included the following:

• A new ‘rulebook’ which provides a framework for how to implement the pledges from the last 2015 climate summit
• A commitment to restrict average temperature rises in the 21st century to well below 2 degrees.
• An agreement on how countries should measure greenhouse gas emissions and how they should account for meeting them.

The agreement was even approved by the United States, and despite the fact that irrational climate change denier and puppet of the oil companies Donald Trump called it ridiculous, he can’t withdraw from the deal until the day after the next presidential election.

Sociological analysis 

This seems to be a rare example of nation states agreeing on joint action to tackle a shared global problem…. which you could say offers broad support for the Functionalist point of view at a global level, because we have (near enough) value consensus.

HOWEVER, this may all be a bit of a sham, as Leslie Hood, writing in The Financial Times points out…

• Nation states are still free to set their CO2 emissions at whatever level they like.
• There is no agreement on the best way to actually reduce emissions.
• There is no regime of sanctions in place to penalise nations who don’t meet their targets.

Ultimately, the success of climate accord largely depends on the top five polluters playing ball, and these are China, the US, Russia, India and the EU. Together these account for 50% of global CO2 emissions, but the first two of these, China and The USA don’t seem to be that committed…. China is still building coal burning power plants and Trump wants to pull out of the deal asap.

Fingers crossed Trump will be elected out and someone who cares about the future of the next generation will be elected into power in November 2020 and the US will be on board. However, even if this does happen, there’s enough evidence of this being a weak deal to say that, where climate change is concerned, nation states still have the power to not commit effectively to reducing it!