The right to development in a climate constrained world

A warming of 2°C over pre-industrial has been widely endorsed as the maximum that can be tolerated or even managed. Yet even as the emerging science1 increasingly underscores how extremely dangerous it would be to exceed 2°C, many people are losing all confidence that today’s inertial, politics-bound societies will be able to prevent such a warming. Our quite different conclusion is that the 2oC line can indeed be held, but that doing so demands a sharp break with politics as usual. Accordingly, we follow the science, defining a global emissions objective – a “2oC emergency pathway” – that preserves a real chance of holding the 2°C line, and then setting out to straightforwardly assess the strategies and accommodations that will be necessary to do so. More specifically, since carbon-based growth is no longer a viable option in either the North or the South, we set out to assess the problem of rapid decarbonization in world, sharply polarized between North and South and, on both sides, between rich and poor.