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Not everything worked out as planned, so in 2015 a new gathering of nations in Paris tried to address means of getting to the goals of the Copenhagen Conference more effectively. Each nation was to work on a 5-year plan that would be evaluated in 2020 and be legally binding (though voluntary). Benchmarks were to be set out at first provisionally and then in a more binding format.
The Paris Agreement provides a framework for financial, technical, and capacity building support to those countries who need it. I was no longer at the Center for American Progress, but from those former colleagues there was even more general hope that we had fixed the difficulties involved with Copenhagen and that this time things would be different. The new short-term targets were “zero-net-emissions.”2 This mindset could be achieved by each unit of national organization: individuals, communities, businesses, and the nation. Everyone could get on board to avoid the 2° Celsius red line.
Then came the 2016 US presidential election of Donald J. Trump. Trump believed that the climate crisis was all a hoax. It would cost the US (one of the leading polluters in the world) lots of money and be bad for business by creating onerous regulations. (Little regard was given to how catastrophic climate disaster would affect US business—but if the whole thing is a hoax, then there will never be a disaster.) Such assertions were not backed up by science. Indeed, science has been behind the international summits that have been regularly occurring since 1972 in Stockholm.