to the Paris Agreement lack the desire or will to meet the agreement’s objective of holding the rise in global temperature to ‘well below’ 2°C above pre-industrial levels. In November 2019, the Obama administration’s climate negotiator and one of the agreement’s architects, declared that: …the Paris Agreement is going to rise and fall on the level of political will in constituent countries of the agreement…The fact is that there is a lack of political will in virtually every country, compared to what there needs to be.15
2.
The role of business
Why should business step into the breach to do what governments won’t or can’t? The enemies of capitalism blame business for the world’s ills: inequality, stagnant income growth, poverty in poor countries, environmental degradation and, of course, global warming. Accepting this critique, the reformers of capitalism counter that the ills capitalism caused, business can cure. Corporations can set themselves a wider social purpose; they can make themselves accountable to their stakeholders and the wider community; they can pledge to engage in sustainable business practices and require their supply chains to do likewise and lobby governments to force other companies to do all those things that they claim is in their interests. It is a critique implicitly conceded by the 181 CEOs of American corporations who put their signatures to the Business Roundtable statement of corporate purpose, demoting profit and their accountability to shareholders.16 All this misses the reason why capitalism has transformed societies for the better. Businessmen, entrepreneurs and investors didn’t set out to make the world a better place, but that is the aggregate result of their individual efforts. The point is beautifully made by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen and his co-authors in The Prosperity Paradox. By investing in market-creating innovations, investors and entrepreneurs inadvertently engage in nation-building…Once these new markets are created, the economy becomes more resilient, as it generates more income to fund schools, roads, hospitals, and even better governance.17
Contrast Christensen’s insight with the dismal and incoherent message of the UN Secretary-General António Guterres banging the drum for fossil fuel divestment and the climate crisis: People around the world are taking to the streets to protest against rising living costs. A narrow focus on growth, regardless of its true cost and consequences, is leading to climate catastrophe.18
Climate policies make energy more expensive, retard development and make poor people poorer. The major emerging economies are going to carbonise before they decarbonise. The growth of global carbon dioxide emissions since 1992 is a conse5
