There is just no accounting for climate change.
This statement is not figurative, in the way 'There's no accounting for taste' is figurative. There's literally no common accounting for what nations in the Paris Agreement are doing to fight climate change. And it's causing headaches for anyone trying to figure out what's actually going on as world leaders gathered for the White House climate summit last week.
The confusion begins with a 2011 diplomatic breakthrough. Developed and developing nations had been locked in a stalemate for two decades over who would do what to fight global warming. Developing nations, which gained access to modern energy decades or even centuries after the West, argued that the climate problem was the rich nations' creation and therefore theirs to solve. Through four presidents, from George H.W. Bush to Barack Obama, the U.S. held a bipartisan position that every country had to do something.