Is effective action on climate change feasible in a political atmosphere overheated by a pandemic, wars, zealous partisanship, and now tariffs? Yes, argues Ani Dasgupta, president and CEO of the World Resources Institute, a nonprofit research organization, in his new book, “The New Global Possible: Rebuilding Optimism in the Age of Climate Crisis.”
The key, Dasgupta argues, is to replicate the bottom-up organizing and negotiating that led to a landmark global climate commitment in Paris in 2015, but with the aim of orchestrating on-the-ground results – not just with countries but also entrepreneurs, businesses, cities, nongovernmental organizations, and communities.
This interview has been lightly edited.
Yale Climate Connections: Ani, your book strikes three positive notes right up front – in the title, the subtitle, and the introduction. “The New Global Possible.” Upbeat. “Rebuilding Optimism in the Age of the Climate Crisis.” Upbeat. “Evidence for Hope.” Upbeat. So you’re clearly saying we have reasons to be hopeful, even emboldened.
Ani Dasgupta: At this moment, especially if you live in D.C., it is really hard to be optimistic. And if you work on climate change, as I do, it’s a very stressful time. But I’m actually optimistic.
I am optimistic, first, because this work, this journey, is taking place all across the world. It’s not in just one country.
There is a trajectory. Even before the current administration in the U.S., there was a lack of optimism in our field. Twenty-fifteen, with the Paris Agreement, was a fantastic year. But seven, eight years after that, people were disappointed that we were not doing the things we said we would do.
And so in my research to do this book, I talked with more than 100 people who are luminaries in this space. And I learned two big things. One is that we have actually done a lot. In the last 30 years of the climate movement – I look back to 1992 and the formation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – we did many big, important things. But we take them for granted today.
The second thing I learned is to do big things now, we need to change how we think about the problem. It’s not just what we need to do, the megawatts we need to produce, the carbon we need to reduce, the electric cars we need. It’s how we orchestrate change so things actually happen on the ground. We have to be self-aware and critical about ourselves. We have to change the way we think and talk and do things. We have to look, collectively, at the bigger question of how.
No one country can solve the climate problem. We need countries to work together. It’s sometimes hard for countries to do that, but we have succeeded several times. Paris was a very good example.
Currently, trust among countries is in a peculiar moment because of all the tariff talk. This will keep coming up. My argument is not simply that we need to do something multilaterally; my view is that there are multiple avenues to the change we need. Multilateralism is one of them. Business is another. And technology. And cities. These are all portals of entry that allow us to explore possible solutions. I have chapters on each of them. We won’t do one thing at a time. We’ll do many things together.
I also emphasize that how is not just a global question. You do things locally, in a space, in a country, in a community. If you want to get momentum, if you want to get people behind this, people have to see benefit from these actions, and that’s local.
YCC: I was intrigued by the metaphor or analogy underlying the word you use many, many times in your book: orchestrate. Orchestrate comes from orchestra. Orchestras have distinctly different sets of instruments: winds, brass, woodwinds, percussion. Considered as parts of an orchestra, countries might be the strings, and maybe business the brass section. But orchestras also have conductors. Are you nominating the World Resources Institute (WRI) as the conductor for this process of orchestration?
Dasgupta: That’s a terrific question. The short answer is no, I’m not. I am still arguing that we have to see this process of change as a process that requires multiple parties, across boundaries, across organizations.
That is the most important lesson of the nearly 70 stories in the book. In every story, the underlying feature is people – businesses, communities, NGOs, governments – coming together and working. Understanding the problem as the challenge of orchestration rather than as a search for a silver bullet is my main message.
For too long, we have said, if we get the technology right, if we figure out wind and solar, and if wind and solar are the right price, then we will have solved the problem. Wind and solar are actually cheaper to produce per unit compared to any fossil fuel, if you’re producing new energy, almost anywhere in the world. So if that were true, there wouldn’t be a problem. We would just be producing renewable energy everywhere.
But we are not because different pieces are not coming together. The policy, the financing, the labor that is required, the government officials that need to know what to do with solar policy, people’s willingness to buy it and use it. That is the orchestration that we need.
YCC: I want to come back to that. You stress, in several chapters, the importance of the 2015 Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UNFCCC in Paris. You say some developments were crucial in the lead-up to Paris, examples of the orchestration of cooperation across different sectors and countries that made Paris work. And Paris then set up a lot of what followed, a lot of what you think might be done now. So could you talk about the significance of Paris in your vision of the new global possible?
Dasgupta: I chose Paris as a story, as a kind of anchor to the book, because it was the first time after 1992 that countries actually agreed to a climate goal collectively. All 192 countries signed up to it. It’s very significant.
But what I found really interesting, digging into the story, is that Paris didn’t happen just in Paris. Many things, many layers of things, happened before that led us to that outcome. One was what happened with Felipe Calderón, who was president of Mexico from 2006 to 2012.
Calderón saw climate change as a foreign relations problem, not a climate science problem. He said we won’t get an agreement if everyone thinks rich countries are telling poor countries what to do, which was the tone in previous meetings. His innovation was that we need every country to tell us what they can do. That was the birth of the NDCs.
YCC: Let me just clarify: NDCs are Nationally Determined Contributions.
Dasgupta: Yes. The biggest word there is “nationally,” not “internationally.” So now every country was asked: “Hey, this is our goal. What can you do? What’s your plan?” So that allowed for a different tone in Paris. What is interesting about Paris, looking backwards, is that it didn’t happen just because the French were very good at organizing – and they were – it also took multiple institutions and arrangements built over time and multiple organizers working together.
Paris showed the best of COP. One of the flaws of COP is that everyone has a vote. So most of the time, people can’t agree because one country says, “We don’t want to do it,” and it doesn’t go forward. But that is also a strength of COP: Everyone has a voice. And the story that really resonates with me is that of Tony de Brum, the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands. He galvanized the discussion: “Keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius is not enough,” he said. “The Marshall Islands won’t survive as a country.”
Imagine that! For most of the people negotiating in Paris, 2 degrees was big enough. They were ecstatic that they might get agreement on 2 degrees. But he said, “No, that’s not enough.” And he succeeded. That part was incredible. Paris then set up a goal for the world that allowed other things to happen to get to that goal of 1.5 degrees by 2050; it also provided a framework within which we could all work.
By 2021, 2022, we were all disappointed that the euphoria of Paris really didn’t pan out. But I wasn’t surprised. Because when we were in Paris, we were doing a numerical exercise of getting a commitment to 1.5 degrees. But to fulfill that commitment, it’s not just about carbon: It requires an economic transition. We need a different economy, one that is not dependent on fossil fuels, one that produces energy that doesn’t kill people, protects nature, and is actually good for communities.
That is the economic shift. I don’t think any one of us realized the magnitude of what was required. So when people, companies, and countries started to do the work, they realized how hard it would be, how much they have to do. So it wasn’t surprising that we didn’t make the progress we wanted or that people were disappointed.
What was and is somewhat surprising is the backlash we see across the world, including in this country, against climate policy.
YCC: You’re helping me reframe much of what I read in your book. Just the fact that people were trying to do these things was kind of amazing. That they then learned how big the challenges would be, that, too, was an important step forward. That we haven’t yet succeeded is not surprising; that we’re still trying to succeed is a very positive sign.
Dasgupta: Yes, we are trying, and we are learning. Until the Glasgow COP in 2021, the thinking was “This is a climate problem, so we should ask the environment ministers to lead the discussion about the NDCs.” But as the NDCs became real, not just a piece of paper, everyone slowly started to realize, “Oh my God, this is actually an economics problem. We have to talk about how we do transport, energy production, construction, agriculture.” Experts in these fields were not involved in the NDC discussions in the initial phases. Now they are.
When we went to COP 29 in Baku last year, the whole discussion was about finance. The whole two weeks was about money. And if you are talking about money, who would you want in the room? You would want all the finance ministers in the room. They weren’t.
But we are learning. The optimism I have is that I see people learning and changing. I want to say it from the rooftops: Don’t be daunted by the slowdown. This was going to happen.
YCC: This connects with a small note in one of your chapters about the new thinking around “country platforms.” In this model, a country like Colombia gathers all of its ministers to assess what the country needs – in every sector. For what do they want to seek outside financing? Rather than the World Bank going to the country and saying, “We can offer you financing for this topical global problem,” Colombia says, “This is what we need to execute our goals. What can you offer?”
Dasgupta: This is a new development, but it’s not a new name. I worked for the World Bank for many years. Ten, 15 years back, the World Bank started telling countries they needed a platform, a “country platform,” because we were finding it difficult to coordinate with other donors.
That didn’t go anywhere. This version is very different. In this version, as you said, countries tell donors what their needs are and then ask for help with finance and coordination. This is an incredibly important step forward.
YCC: You have chapters that illustrate how this coordinating orchestration could work in technology, business, justice, cities. Choose one as an example.
Dasgupta: One of my very favorite examples is the technology chapter because it doesn’t talk all that much about technology; it talks about forests.
The market is actually very good at producing technology that works really well. That is not enough. For technology to be a driver for change, it must produce good outcomes. And that can only happen when you bring along primary users, regulators, businesses, and people from organizations like WRI to help them work together. Global Forest Watch converted good technology – satellite observation systems and incredible advances in geospatial analysis – into a good outcome: a protected forest. An Indigenous community in Indonesia, for example, can tell the forest services where forest is burning and say, “You need to do something about it.”
It’s action on the ground enabled by technology. That’s the outcome you’re looking for, not the technology itself, nor the maps we produce. The underlying goal is to compress the cycle of innovation by targeting technological progress at users’ needs through radical collaboration.
YCC: I want to return to the question of the conductor. Donald Trump seems to be acting as a conductor; he has orchestrated a backlash beyond what most of us thought was possible. How does the world handle a conductor who’s trying to play the old fossil fuel tunes?
Dasgupta: It’s a very good question. Let me use the framing of the book to make two points.
First, as we have discussed already, this backlash, this slowdown, was predictable. You could only be surprised if you weren’t paying attention. Our hydrocarbon economy is 200 years old, and it’s the most successful economy in the history of human civilization. That is the economy we need to change. The people who run it are very well organized, very successful, very powerful. We shouldn’t be surprised when they resist.
The administration’s energy policy actually has one thing right, but they use a weird term here, energy dominance, instead of energy independence. The fact that the secretary of energy talks about abundance of energy and affordability, these are really good things. Where we disagree is how to get there. In the United States, we now have an energy demand gap; energy demand grew steadily because of enormous investments in servers and AI.
So how do we meet these new energy demands while transitioning our entire energy system? My view is that we have to do everything that we can. The good news is we have incredible technologies today that can meet this challenge. It’s not just solar and wind, which will be the mainstays. What’s happening with batteries, how fast prices are going down, is unprecedented.
These are just better technologies. Just as automobiles were better than the horse-drawn buggies. It is inevitable. The question is, can we get there faster?
And will the United States remain the dominant innovator in this new world of new technology? Not with the policies this administration is putting in place.
YCC: We have another Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change coming up in November. What’s your hope for COP30 in Brazil?
Dasgupta: I think the next COP will be super exciting because it’s in Brazil. Brazil has put a class team in place. And there is a lot of hope for Brazil’s leadership. André Corrêa do Lago, who will preside over COP30, is an extremely capable diplomat.
Brazil will try very hard to make sure funding for tropical forests is a central part of the conversation and that we find a long-term solution for protecting and enhancing tropical forests across the world. Only one-third are left. So it’s kind of a pivotal moment.
I’m hopeful; I want to be supportive. But because of the trade discussions, it’s also a fraught moment. Even in such moments, however, countries have historically come together on climate change. So we will see. Big things could be achieved.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
