A “fair and ambitious” pledge? Not quite
Over two weeks in December, delegates from virtually every country in the world will gather in Paris for the 21st annual United Nations Climate Change Conference. Their ambitious goal: to hammer out a binding international agreement on climate action. In advance of the conference, organizers have requested that countries submit Intended Nationally Determined Contributions — pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, by an amount that should be “fair and ambitious,” in order to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Now a new study by researchers at MIT and the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, Norway, has found that pledges by the three largest emitters — the United States, the European Union, and China — leave very little room for the rest of the world to emit. Based on the pledges submitted, the U.S. plans to reduce emissions by 28 percent by 2025,...