In this pivotal chapter, I examine the 1.5°C emissions pathways urged upon us in the 2018 IPCC SR15 report. I compare those steeply plunging emissions pathways to emissions predictions over the next 30 years made by McKinsey and Bloomberg to demonstrate that the IPCC pathways are unlikely to obtain. To devise what seems a more likely scenario, I utilize the McKinsey/Bloomberg scenarios through 2050 and append to them subsequently the sort of emissions plummet that the IPCC would recommend we commence in 2021. Even in 2050, an emissions nose-dive seems an optimistic scenario but it illustrates a pathway to Net Zero Emissions by 2084. I then translate that emissions pathway into a temperature outcome that shows an increase of roughly 2.7°C above pre-industrial temperatures in the Net Zero year. More importantly, I illustrate that after Net Zero, temperatures and therefore resulting climate damages plateau rather than decline. Worse yet, sea levels would continue to rise for centuries. Having undertaken the enormous sacrifices necessary to achieve Net Zero, I assert that future generations are unlikely to find that state of affairs acceptable. They will demand further action to reduce temperatures and climate damages. They will demand climate intervention.

Whereas the C40 was fragmented in its early years, the network underwent a process of transformative change that began with the selection of Michael Bloomberg, as mayor of New York City, as C40 Chair in late 2009. As described in Chapters 1 and 3, both coordination and convergence around a common set of governance norms and a collective identity were increasingly apparent during the four-year period (2010-2014) in which New York occupied the C40 Chair. The theory of global urban governance fields is applied to explain why Bloomberg and New York were able to achieve what both the Clinton Climate Initiative and previous C40 Chairs could not. Bloomberg and New York brought with them considerable claims to material, reputational, and institutional capital, but it was the ability to link these to securing recognition for the cities of the C40 from external audiences – international financial institutions like the World Bank, multinational corporations, private capital markets – that authorized them to set the terms upon which such recognition would be granted within the governance field. In so doing the C40 began to converge toward a common set of governance norms – autonomy and global accountability – that underpin the production of coordinated action.

Convergence and coordination in the C40 emerged as a function of the authority of Michael Bloomberg and New York City to establish and project onto the governance field a particular set of governance norms and a sense of collective identity. This chapter demonstrates the extent to which convergence around those norms and identity not only continued, but also rather accelerated, following the shift in C40 leadership that took place in early 2014. The analytic focus thus shifts from an emphasis on agency – who claims authority, how actors attempt to shape the substance of the governance field – to the structuring effects that governance fields exert once those ideational and identity contours are entrenched. The chapter documents the extent to which the C40 governance field, from 2014-2018, consolidated around governance norms of autonomous agency and global accountability. The theory of global urban governance fields is deployed to illuminate the manner in which these norms constitute both the parameters within which member cities have come to understand and enact their role as global climate governors, and the mechanism of recognition through which these norms are replicated and reinforced across the C40.