ABSTRACT
The Paris Agreement fully expects substantive impacts from human-induced climate change and has given up on avoiding all of them. The ultimate aim of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was meant to be the ‘stabilization of greenhouse gases concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’, not the implementation of a policy offering a 50:50 chance of suffering the worst impacts. The Paris Agreement follows suit and claims that: ‘Accelerating, encouraging and enabling innovation is critical for an effective, long-term global response to climate change and promoting economic growth and sustainable development’. The contradiction at the heart of the Paris Agreement is actually unsurprising because the powerful lobbying for growth as the solution to climate change has for some time been orchestrated by corporate business and financiers using the rhetoric of a green economy.
