Coal, Cash, and Climate: The Complexities of the Paris Agreement

In this episode of Running My Mouth Off About Climate Change, Dave dives into the complexities of the Paris Agreement, exploring the fine balance between global climate goals and the practical challenges nations face. From countries struggling to meet emission targets to the realities of coal dependence and funding gaps, this episode unpacks the critical issues often overlooked in the climate change conversation. Tune in for a candid discussion on the global efforts to combat climate change, the politics behind the Paris Agreement, and what lies ahead for the world’s climate future.

Transcript

At a time when we’re all trying to cut greenhouse gas emissions, Zimbabwe, which is a member of the Paris Agreement, is doubling down on climate change and firing up coal plants. What is up with that? 

I’m Dave and thank you so much for joining me today on Running My Mouth Off about Climate Change, where we talk about some of the lesser discussed issues that surround Climate Change, and today, that topic is the Paris Agreement. 

Ok, the Paris Accords, or Agreements, whichever name you prefer, technically isn’t a lesser discussed issue, especially these days but, in light of what’s going on now in Washington DC, I couldn’t resist staying away from it. 

We’ll get to Zimbabwe in a few minutes but first, let’s do a really brief dive into what exactly the Paris Agreement is, and then talk about Zimbabwe and President Trump’s executive order effectively removing the United States from the Accord. 

Starting off, what exactly is the Paris Agreement, what’s inside of it. 

Simply put, it’s a document, a plan, that’s focused on keeping global temperatures 2 degrees celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, below pre-industrial levels. It was negotiated over and drafted in November of 2015 near Paris, France, hence the name Paris Agreement, and then later signed in 2016 by almost 200 countries.  

The horsepower behind this thing, what everything revolves around, is something called the NDC, which stands for Nationally Determined Contributions. And countries file these upon initially joining the Agreement and then update it every five years. And by the way, if you look at the text of the Paris Agreement, you’ll read that it’s “legally binding”. Essentially what that means is that it’s been formalized under international law, it’s not legally binding in the sense that you can be punished for not obeying it, nobody’s going to get flogged for not hitting their NDC goals. More on that later though…the legal stuff, not the flogging. 

Back to the NDC’s.

Essentially, what these are, are plans that contain are state of the country at the time of the filing, i.e., the amount of greenhouse gasses they’re emitting, where they’d like to be in five years, and the steps that they intend to take in order to get there. 

As time moves on and these countries are hopefully working towards their NDC goals, they check in periodically and come under a review process called the Transparency and Accountability process. And the name is pretty much explains the process so I won’t really go into it. 

Every five years, at the COP meetings, and by the way COP stands for Conference of the Parties by the way, (no idea who came up with that name but, that’s what it’s called) all of these NDC’s are looked at from a global perspective and things are evaluated on a mass scale, and this process is called Global Stocktake, where stock is taken globally. 

The first global stocktake was concluded in COP28 in 2023 Dubai, and I believe the next one will happen in 2028.

By the way, the results of the first global stocktake are that “progress has been made to limit global temperatures to 2.1-2.8 degrees celsius from a predicted 4 degrees.” And there are various calls to action like more aggressively limiting use of fossil fuels, tripling the amount of renewable energy that we produce and doubling its production efficiency, and a few other things. 

All of these things take money though, which leads to another principle of the Paris Agreement. And that’s, where the heck do we get the cash to do all of this? 

There are some countries, like the US, China and the UK, who can afford to undertake all of these projects. But what if you’re a country like Zimbabwe? 

So let’s talk about Zimbabwe. 

Yes, they’re firing up coal-fired plants again in order to get electricity, which will no doubt make their NDC goals pretty tough to reach, but there’s pretty good reason for it. 

In 2022 and 23, Zimbabwe was hit by a fairly serious drought. During that time, California was hit by an El Niño, by a series of el Ninos, which brought in a significant amount of badly needed rain, but there’s only so much rain to go around. So, while California got more than it’s fill, places like Mexico, Brazil and Zimbabwe just, didn’t get a lot. 

A lot of Zimbabwe’s electricity comes from Hydroelectric sources, meaning it’s generated using water that comes from lakes and reservoirs. But, as the drought was setting in, those water sources started to dry up, so Zimbabwe lost that ability to generate electricity.

As I was reading about this a couple of weeks ago, I ran across and interview with a guy named Kuda Manjonjo, who’s an associate with an organization called Power Shift Africa, said this in an interview in early 2025: 

“we were going through 23 hours a day of no electricity, It would be very hard for any government in the world to justify not producing coal, which is there with the [power] plants, when people do not have electricity.”

People need electricity, right? And Zimbabwe has literally no other options, so they broke out the coal. Now, they are currently upgrading and cleaning up the plants in order to make them burn more cleanly and more efficiently, but it’s still going to produce a fair amount of greenhouse gasses. 

In a perfect world, it would’ve had solar and wind farms ready to fill the gap, but it can’t afford to do that because it doesn’t have the money. 

So, with situations like this in mind, the Paris Agreement calls for countries who have the means, i.e., the US, UK, China, the EU, etc…, to help the UN financially come along side countries like Zimbabwe. So, it’s set up a fund to do just that. 

Countries can donate to this fund, completely on a voluntary basis, and then the UN, through the Agreement, can funnel the cash to where it’s most desperately needed in order to help these countries meet their NDC’s, thereby reducing emissions. 

So, talking about this fund, what kind of money are we looking at?

When the Agreement was first laid out in 2015, it was estimated that $100 billion US per year would be needed in order to achieve these goals. Now, that we’ve gotten a little bit more clarity on the situation on the whole, that figure has jumped to $6 trillion US total, which is a pretty significant increase.

Incidentally, when the US first entered the Agreement under President Obama, the US promised $3bil a year. Then Trump version 1.0 happened and the US exited the Agreement, President Biden took office, the US joined again and up’d the yearly amount to total $11bil total. More on that in a minute. 

What exactly is being done with this money that’s going into the Agreement? It seems to be a bit hard to determine. Ideally, the UN would have a link on the Paris Agreement website that says, “here’s how the money is being used.”. Unfortunately though, that doesn’t exist. 

In looking around, it seems that a lot of groups have been created who’s purpose is calls for action, I haven’t dug into the actual groups though but it doesn’t appear that these groups are writing checks to countries like Zimbabwe. Again, in a perfect world, the UN would simply ask Zimbabwe, “What do you need?”, and then respond by saying, “Check your account, the money’s there…”, but that clearly didn’t happen in Zimbabwe’s case. 

A few things though that do pop up though are programs like solar panel installations and improved residential heating and cooling systems in Azerbaijan; also modernization of weather reporting systems and mudflow channels being installed in Armenia; training of Solar Panel repair persons in Bhutan; forest management in the the Republic of Georgia and in Kenya, and a few other things so progress has been made using these funds. 

And this is a good point to look at how countries can exit the agreement. Because there’s a few nuggets there.

It takes a year, once countries express intent to exit the Paris agreement, to actually be out of it. And, to date, only one country has done that—and it’s done that twice. The good ole US of A under President Trump. And I can completely understand though why this one year timeframe has been put in place. 

Just looking at money alone, any time you’re running a budget with any degree of complexity, you want to know what’s coming in and what’s going out. And having at least a year of visibility into what things will look like is pretty important. So, that one year timeframe was put in place, and I think it makes sense.

But again, the United States have pulled out. 

Looking at the executive order from the White House, I noticed this text in Section 3a: 

“The United States Ambassador to the United Nations shall immediately submit formal written notification of the United States’ withdrawal from the Parts Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, The notice shall be submitted to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the Depositary of the Agreement, attached as Appendix A. And, here’s the good part….The United States will consider its withdrawal from the Agreement and any attendant obligations to be effective immediately upon this provision of notification.”

So, the Paris Agreement says that it takes a year to exit. Meanwhile, the White House is saying, “Ya, we’re good with things ending right now.” And, of course, as there isn’t any punishment for not adhering to the details of the agreement, so, the UN really don’t have a say in exactly when the US exits. 

So, that $11bil that’s been promised by President Biden, the UN isn’t going to see a penny of that for at least the next 4 years. So, if the Paris Agreement is going to reach its financial goals, countries like China, Japan, the UK, etc…those who best equipped to donate, those who have the most money, will just need to step up. 

In a little personal commentary, which I really try to avoid when talking politics, if you’re in a group of people who are throwing rocks at windows, and a bunch of windows actually get broken, and if you’re one of the leaders of that group of people? Shouldn’t you stick around to help pay for the windows that you broke? President Trump’s executive order starts out like this, this is in the second paragraph: 

“In recent years, the United States has purported to join international agreements and initiatives that do not reflect our country’s values or our contributions to the pursuit of economic and environmental objectives.  Moreover, these agreements steer American taxpayer dollars to countries that do not require, or merit, financial assistance in the interests of the American people.”

Mmmkay, letting that sink in for a moment. That last part, the part about countries that do not, “require, or merit financial assistance”? Seems, and I’m going to try to be as diplomatic as I can here, that the President might be painting with a bit too broad of a brush. I totally get that there are countries who would do the US harm if given the opportunity, and the President’s desire not to support countries like that. I understand that. But, the thing is, greenhouse gasses like Co2, Methane, nitrous oxide, don’t have political affiliations, and this is very much a global problem with ripple effects occurring from almost everything that we do. Again, if you need an example of a ripple effect, just look at the El Nino’s that hit California, and how, because of those, places like Mexico and Zimbabwe didn’t get a lot of rain. And you can be sure that, when those countries do get a lot of rain, California probably won’t. And again, gasses like Co2 don’t care about politics, they’re going to impact everyone regardless of where they originate. So ya, President Trump wants to be more selective, more autonomous in how the country disperses its money. This is still a global issue though. And I think that I just effectively stayed away from a major rant. 

So, how else is the US exit from the Paris Agreement going to impact things, what’s that going to look like? I have noticed that there’s a ton of press coming out that’s commenting on how, now that the agreement has been left and regulations on manufacturing eased in the US, along with a Drill Baby, Drill mentality on the part of President Trump, will increase greenhouse gas emissions locally, and that’s likely the case, but there are a lot of companies out there who, in spite of the recent actions, remain steadfast in their goals to reduce emissions. For example, Ford Motor Company has the intention of being Carbon Neutral by 2050, and GM has stated that their climate change goals remain unchanged in spite of the recent Executive Order. 

The American people want to buy from companies who demonstrate climate responsibility so, in spite of the White House’s opinion on Climate Change, public opinion looks like it will continue to drive a lot of progress. 

The US also has the Climate Change Alliance, which is a bi-partisan alliance of State Governors who have come together to advance state led climate action. Currently, only 24 out of 50 states are represented in that, wondering what’s up with the other 26, but those states who are included do represent 55% of the country’s population. 

So its not like there isn’t a lot of momentum that’s been built outside of the White House, there are plenty of reasons that the country can and will continue to move forward, there’s a lot to reasons to have hope. 

Getting back to the Paris Agreement though and the US withdrawal. 

Aside from the money that won’t find its way into the UN’s coffers, there will no doubt be a huge void that’s created in the area of influence. As the US won’t be there to voice its opinion on things like expenditures and implementation and, well, void creates vacuum, other countries like China, Japan and the UK will likely seize the opportunity and step up. (Let’s keep America first by letting others dictate world events!)

And, John Kerry, who was the US Secretary of State at the time of the signing, was very influential in the initial drafting of the Paris Agreement, and probably more influential in getting countries to sign up for it, so that loss of influence is going to be fairly significant. 

Those are the two areas that I see changing with the US withdrawal, money and influence, but, switching gears a bit, how effective has the Paris Agreement actually been? 

When you ask that question, the answer to that Is a bit complicated. 

If how you want to measure its effectiveness is through the success of NDC’s, know that, at present, none of the countries are on track to hit the goals that they’ve set out. There are some that are doing better than others, but nobody’s going to reach those initial goals. 

Limiting its success though, in this effect, in this way does a bit of a disservice to it though, and I think that a better to way to measure it, is in terms of its impact. And, I’ll just mention a few things here about why I think this is true. 

Firstly, there are those countries like Kenya, the Republic of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and others, who are now much better positioned to make huge strides in the area of climate change .

And secondly, more developed countries like China, are in fact doing a lot of really cool things to lower their emissions. China in particular, started an incredibly aggressive reforestation effort a number of years ago and, if you look at satellite photos, you’ll see that the country is indeed much greener than it was not too long ago. 

And by the way, two countries tend to be greening up a lot when you look at satellite photos, China and India.———

It’s also gotten really serious about reducing the greenhouse gasses that it puts out, aiming to peak in its emissions by 2030, and being net-zero by 2060. Keep in mind though that net-zero is not zero emissions and its reforestation efforts will go a long way towards making net-zero happen, if it does happen. 

And the third thing that I’ll mention here is that there are other things that have come out of the Paris Agreement that likely wouldn’t had the Agreement not been put in place. And two of these things are the Loss and Damage fund, which helps countries recover from climate change related weather events, and the other is the The Global Methane Pledge, which aims to reduce methane emissions by 30%. Both of these are highly cool things, and again, neither would have come around had it not been for the Paris Agreement. 

There’s also a lot of noise that’s made about how it’s so deeply impacted public opinion in the area of climate change. Honestly though, I’m not sure how you can quantify that. There is so much noise being made right now about climate change, in everything from the news to television commercials, I’m not sure that you can say that one thing or the other was more or less responsible in forming those options or strengthening them so, I’ll just leave that one there. 

The last thing that I’ll mention about it’s effectiveness/impact is this. Almost 200 countries signed up for it. That’s huge, think about that.

Imagine getting 20 people in a room and collectively trying to decide what color to paint a specific wall. How difficult would it be to reach a consensus? While the Paris Agreement isn’t all that complex as far as treaties go, it’s a lot more complicated than looking at color samples and debating about which one to go with. Achieving the success that it has, just in the number of countries who agreed to participate. is nothing short of monumental. So ya, I’d call that a huge win for the Agreement. 

I think I’m going to leave things right here for now. I will be doing some traveling over the next few weeks for business and I’m not sure that I’ll be able to get something up next week, but I’ll try? I typically like to drop on Tuesdays so, if I’m not around next Tuesday, I will be in another week. 

I think that I’ll finally be diving into the topic of organic foods, something that I’ve been wanting to explore for a while. They seem like they’d be better for the environment, but are they really? Anyway, that’s what’s up next. 

Again, I’m Dave and thank you sooo much for joining me today on Running my mouth of about climate change, I realize that you could be doing so many other things with your time and I’m honored that you chose to a little bit of it with me today. I hope you have an amazing week.