Extract from The Guardian
Despite the dysfunctional international process
and the imperfect national promises and the arguments over detail,
the Paris agreement – setting solid expectations for the world to
limit temperature rise – gives even a cynic cause for optimism
Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN
framework convention on climate change, UN secretary general Ban
Ki-moon, French foreign affairs minister Laurent Fabius and French
President François Hollande react during the final plenary session
at the Paris climate conference. Photograph: Stephane Mahe/Reuters
Lenore
Taylor in Paris
Sunday 13 December 2015 09.31 AEDT
No superlative was left unused as the French
president François Hollande, the foreign minister Laurent Fabius and
the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon lined up on Saturday to maximise
pressure on negotiators in Paris
to accept the final draft of the climate agreement.
They would be “making history”, it was a
“moment of truth”, it would go down as “a major date in the
history of mankind”, there would never be another chance, the
future of the world, quite literally, depended upon the decision they
were about to make that moment. And then they broke for lunch. The
meeting was in France,
after all.
Well-fed, and aware that the deal was already
being hailed around the world, despite not yet being actually done,
the negotiators did reconvene later in the day.
But then – even as everyone had started
celebrating – the agreement almost fell apart.
Somehow, the word “should” had been replaced
with “shall” in a crucial part of the text, which created the
possibility of a legal obligation and a very big problem for the
Americans, who may then have had to take the agreement to Congress,
where it would be defeated.
The French proposed that the text simply be
corrected, but some other delegates saw an opportunity – first
African countries sought some compensatory last-minute changes but
were persuaded by a number of countries, including China to desist.
Then Nicaraguan negotiator Paul Oquist tried to get some concessions
as well, and persisted. An hour ticked by.
Eventually – as things became desperate and
ministers had been waiting in the room for 90 minutes not knowing the
reason for the delay – both Cuban president Raul Castro and US
secretary of state John Kerry were enlisted to call Nicaraguan
president Daniel Ortega to ask him to get his climate negotiator to
stand down, according to a senior source.
And
then finally it was done, with whooping and jubilation and hugs
all round.
It was the final step in a delicate diplomatic
dance the French had played for a week to ease the negotiating blocs
towards agreement and break down divisions that had atrophied over
years – a second draft that built political capital in the
developing world by leaning options their way, a third that tweaked
some clauses back towards what the rich nations wanted and then –
after several all-night negotiations – the moment, when the text
was presented and adopted.
But was it really so historic? What did it really
achieve? Two weeks at the climate summit were a wild ride between
cynicism and the final realisation that there were reasons to be
optimistic, despite the dysfunctionality of it all. And not just
because of good lunches.
It is stuffy in the small packed room at the Paris
climate summit where former Indonesian president Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono is delivering a speech about the green economy. He’s now
the chair of the Global Green Growth
Institute. He mentions planting four billion trees in the past
four years. He doesn’t mention his country still
has one of the highest rates of rainforest deforestation in the world
or the recent peatland fires that produced greenhouse
emissions equivalent to the entire United States.
Australia’s foreign affairs minister, Julie
Bishop, is speaking now. She talks about the profound economic
changes as the world moves away from fossil fuels, then slips in the
apparently obligatory Australian-politics rider about fossil fuels
also being around for a long time and helping alleviate poverty. She
also mentions – yet again – that Australia will “meet and beat”
its climate targets. She does not mention that Australia’s
total emissions are rising.
As she draws to a close, music starts up nearby.
The “Paris” summit is actually 11km from the centre of Paris, an
18 hectare temporary tent city built around a former airport. The
room is in a hangar, its thin plywood walls doing little to filter
the strains of Songs of Freedom. The minister raises her voice to
compete with Bob Marley.
It’s moments like these that the blah blah of
these climate summits becomes almost overwhelming. Endless scripted
statements about doing the right thing by our children and saving the
planet and the need for “ambitious action” blend into a wall of
meaningless noise.
Delegates trudge past youth protesters doing
street theatre or interpretive dance with barely a glance. A
giant polar bear roars periodically. Sean Paul sings a
toe-curlingly bad song called Love
Song to the Earth. Ban Ki-moon walks past. Every morning cheerful
people give everyone entering apples and chocolate. Days slide by.
At the same time, in the backrooms and the
conference halls the actual negotiators reprise the same arguments
they’ve been having for the past 23 years that are all about
maximising their domestic political interests and doing little.
The disconnect seems cavernous.
Island states and low-lying “climate vulnerable”
countries like the Marshall Islands, Bangladesh, the Philippines and
Vietnam run an unexpectedly effective campaign to change the goal of
the agreement from limiting global warming at 2C to bringing it back
to less than 1.5C. They assemble powerful supporters, including the
United States, the European Union, Germany, France, Brazil and –
eventually – Australia. President
Obama spent some of his two days in Paris meeting with island state
leaders and calls himself an “island boy”. The young
activists paint 1.5C on their faces and sing songs about it in the
streets.
In the end it all boils down to an agreed
“purpose” in the Paris deal to hold global temperature increases
to “well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts
to limit (them) to 1.5C, recognising that this would significantly
reduce risks and impacts of climate change”.
The need for a new goal is obvious, especially
from the low-lying states’ point of view. Two degrees, according to
Michiel Schaeffer of Climate Analytics, would deliver destructive sea
level rises, threaten the existence of many islands and cause
enormous dislocation in the low-lying states. (It would also
devastate the Great Barrier Reef.)
But the greenhouse gas reduction promises made by
187 countries in Paris – even if they are kept (and that’s a very
big if) would result in warming of between 2.7 and 3.5C. Almost 1C of
warming is already locked in. To get to 1.5C most scientists think
the world would have to suck back greenhouse emissions already in the
atmosphere, using processes that remain uncertain.
And while negotiators and campaigners plead for a
goal that appears unattainable, it is not until very late in the
process – the second all-night meeting (called an “indaba”,
using a zulu word apparently because a previous meeting was held in
Durban) – that the fight gets down to the rules under which
countries account for, report and review what they actually will do
to achieve the emission reductions they have promised.
This seems surprising, since these rules are the
only real teeth this agreement has, because the targets themselves
have to sit outside the legally binding part of the document (so the
deal doesn’t have to go to the US Congress where it would
inevitably be scuppered) and the implementing rules contain no
sanctions. The whole idea of this thing is that peer pressure holds
countries to account and builds the trust that means they agree to
deeper cuts over time.
It’s doubly surprising since some of the
individual country promises are what campaigners politely described
as “patchy”. Saudi Arabia, for example, has promised to reduce
emissions by a specific amount each year, so long as the Paris
agreement doesn’t hurt its capacity to export oil. If it does –
and that is surely part of the point of the exercise – the Saudis
say they will have to contribute less. (They
spend most of the week trying to block pretty much everything
anyway). Other promises are conditional on countries getting
money.
Many developing countries are determined to cling
to a principle called “differentiation” enshrined in the 1992
climate convention agreed in Rio de Janeiro. It was conceived to
recognise the fact that the industrialisation of rich countries was
then responsible for most of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
and it wasn’t reasonable to suggest poor countries forgo
industrialisation to deal with the problem. But China is now the
world’s largest greenhouse emitter. India is the fourth largest.
A new agreement can promise financial help to poor
countries to cope with locked-in climate change, it can put different
expectations of the extent of emission reductions different countries
can deliver, and it can recognise that many of them just aren’t
able to do comprehensive emission calculations. But in the view of
countries like the United States and Australia, it must set the
expectation that China and India and big developing emitters will
properly account for their greenhouse gases. This is what they call a
“red line”, a dealbreaker.
The issue is discussed for hours. International
negotiators appear to require superhuman levels of patience, as well
as the ability to withstand a process designed to wear them down
through the sustained deprivation of sleep. In the end they find an
acceptable compromise.
The agreement also established a system to review
each country’s emissions every five years and conduct regular
global “stocktakes” of the targets and also the finance being
provided. Those, like Australia and India, which have promised
reductions by 2030, will be “requested” to do a 2020 review.
India has made it very clear it is likely to decline the request.
It’s formal pledge says things like “our ancient text says; “Keep
pure! For the Earth is our mother! And we are her children!” and
that “the ancient Indian practice of yoga, for example, is a system
that is aimed at balancing contentment and worldly desires, that
helps pursue a path of moderation and a sustainable lifestyle”.
It includes actual plans, according
to an assessment by Carbon Tracker, to lock in another generation
of coal-fired power stations and emissions growing to five thousand
million tonnes of CO2 by 2030, even though India also has plans for
its renewable sector which is set to grow almost twice as fast as its
coal-fired electricity generation.
According
to the United Nations Environment Program, the “gap” between
fully implementing all the Paris promises and actually keeping global
warming even to 2C is between 12 and 14 thousand million tonnes of
carbon dioxide.
Comparing that reality with the political
“support” for limiting warming to 1.5C makes the whole singing,
dancing, roaring, sleepless circus seem pointless.
But then a series of coffee shop conversations
challenge my cynic’s take on the conference.
I’m talking to Howard Bamsey, who I’ve
encountered at many of these events – he was Australia’s lead
negotiator in Kyoto in 1997 when the protocol was agreed as well as
the special envoy on climate change in Copenhagen in 2009. He says
he’s been to 18 or 19 of these “conferences of the parties” or
COPs – he’s lost count. He’s an academic now and has always
been a details man, not someone to get carried away by the speeches
and the singing.
And despite everything, he’s optimistic.
“I’ve had this impression growing on me all
week. When this process started governments were all important,
whether they moved or not was the whole story. Here governments are
only part of the picture. When we went to side events by business or
environment groups 15 or 20 years ago it was all about the good ideas
they might be able to do if they had the right policies. Now it’s
about what they have already done,” he says.
I think back to the start of the conference. There
was this thing called the Lima Paris Action Agenda where hundreds
of businesses and thousands of regions and cities made promises to
cut emissions that streamed into my email inbox in a torrent.
Mondelēz International promised US$400mn to
support the production of sustainable cocoa with zero net
deforestation in Africa; Germany, Norway and the United Kingdom
announced they’d provide $5bn by 2020 if forest countries
demonstrated measured, reported and verified emission reductions; 20
investor groups, representing US$3.2tr, committing to
‘decarbonisation’ of US$600bn in assets, 114 big companies
promised to reduce emissions including Ikea, Coca-Cola, Dell, General
Mills, Kellogg’s, NRG Energy, Procter & Gamble, Sony and
Walmart.
Clive Hamilton is the former head of the Australia
Institute. He was also in Kyoto, in fact he was the one who did the
quick calculations there to show Australia had pulled a swifty with
the so-called “Australia Clause” which meant it knew it had
already met its Kyoto target even before it was made because it could
count land clearing that had already stopped in the state of
Queensland.
He wrote
on the Conversation website that for him “the most surprising
revelation here at the Paris climate conference has been the
astonishing shift in the world of investors over the past 12 months.
There is now unprecedented momentum towards participating in the
transition to a low-carbon economy, and the view at the “big end”
of the conference is that a strong agreement will provide an extra
shove. It’s unstoppable now.
“It’s not that investors and chief executives
have had an ethical epiphany about climate change; it’s just that
they can see where the world is headed, and it makes sense to be part
of it rather than being stuck in the economy of the 20th century.”
Even the reporting issue – the need to shine a
light on what governments are doing – might be to an extent taken
out of the hands of governments and the detailed requirements of this
agreement, because private groups like Climate Tracker and the World
Resources Institute are doing their own calculations and increasingly
governments have nowhere to hide.
John Niles teaches greenhouse gas accounting at
the not-for-profit Greenhouse Gas Management Institute. In Paris he
launched an international partnership with similar trainers around
the world called the Carbon Institute. They’ll educate a generation
of greenhouse gas accountants who can do the work in every country
the Paris agreement demands. And if countries can’t or don’t
report properly, or try to hide what they are really doing, Niles
says the same accounting skills can reveal the truth anyway.
“Of course we can check on governments,” he
says. “Satellites can check CO2 in the atmosphere ... they can
measure the size of a forest and take multidimensional pictures ...
they can create a pretty good picture of what a country is doing,”
he says.
When you look at Paris as an expression of global
will, a final piece of evidence for business about where the world is
heading, a turbo-charge for investment decisions that are already
starting, then the whole kerfuffle about the 1.5C target also makes
sense.
“It sends a signal, it creates a clear sense of
direction, or urgency,” says one veteran negotiator, who asks not
to be named. “Without it the take-out message might have been about
the ins and outs of exactly what each country was doing and when they
would do it. This points to where the world needs to be going and
where it intends to go and that signal is unambiguous.”
Bamsey concedes the national promises are “very,
very patchy.” But he also says concentrating just on the detail of
the reporting and the reviews misses the point.
“Some developed countries still think of
reporting as a way of checking up because you don’t want people
getting away with anything, but that is really a reflection of the
old thinking of climate change as a burden. Most governments
understand it is in their national interest to do more ... what used
to be seen as free riding, getting away with not acting, now is seen
as economic suicide.
“I’m finding it impossible not to be
optimistic because it feels like we have reached a tipping point,
like this shift has become unstoppable,” he says looking back on a
lifetime of COPs like a parent assessing a wayward child who’s
somehow turned out OK despite everything.
And when the agreement is final reached, that is
exactly what business is saying.
Nigel Topping, from a coalition called We Mean
Business, calls it an “historic economic catalyst”.
Michael Jacobs, senior adviser for the
New Climate Economy project, says the long-term goals in the
agreement send investors the clearest sign “that the world was on
an irreversible and irrevocable downward trend in emissions”.
So I leave thinking the Paris agreement – for
the first time setting expectations for all nations and for the world
– might just be a strong enough signal to give real momentum
towards slowing global warming despite the dysfunctional
international process and the imperfect national promises and the
arguments over detail that will continue interminably at such
conferences.
That’s a cynical optimist’s view of this
extraordinary Paris summit.
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