The Paris Agreement, which celebrated its fifth birthday on December 12, is among the most remarkable diplomatic achievements in world history, representing decades of work to arrive at a common framework for capping global temperature rise at “well below” 2 degrees Celsius. It’s also basically toothless—as is the body in which it was brokered: the United National Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC.
President-elect Joe Biden has promised to undo Trump’s withdrawal and re-enter the Paris Agreement, rallying the world in the name of climate action. “We have to raise the ambition of every nation in the world in order to get this job done,” Biden’s new climate czar John Kerry told NPR last week. He noted the need for “humility” from the U.S. on the world stage and for the country to do its part at home. Yet Kerry still seems to have a fairly standard American answer to the problem of how to enforce global climate rules among the world’s governments: Tell them to do so at high-profile U.N. summits. His message—and Biden’s—is that the UNFCCC basically works.