| How Far Is the World From Meeting Its Climate Goals? |
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Brad Plumer Climate change reporter at The New York Times |
| Dear readers, |
| As the next round of international climate talks kicks off Monday in Bonn, Germany, many of the headlines will focus on what role the Trump administration will play in these negotiations — especially since President Trump has vowed to leave the Paris climate agreement by 2020. |
| But there’s a much deeper problem looming over these talks. None of the world’s major industrialized nations are yet doing anything close to what’s needed to avoid drastic global warming in the decades ahead. Not the United States. Not Europe. Not Canada. Not Japan. |
| As we show in an article published today, there’s a large gap between what countries are currently doing to cut their greenhouse gas emissions and what they promised to do in Paris in 2015. |
| That’s not all: There’s an even larger gap between what they promised in Paris and what scientists say is needed to keep the world below 2 degrees Celsius of global warming, the threshold that world leaders have agreed is unacceptably risky. The charts by my colleague Nadja Popovich make this gap stark. |
| My colleague Lisa Friedman and I plan to be in Bonn next week to find out whether the world can close this gap in the decades ahead. We hope you will follow along, and please let us know if there are themes you’d like us to write about. |
Brad Plumer
brad.plumer@nytimes.com
@bradplumer on Twitter |