A Leaner Climate Proposal Emerges, Complete With Big Questions

New York Times - Coral Davenport

LE BOURGET, France — The new draft text of the United Nations climate accord was released Saturday, whittled from 50 pages to a surprisingly readable 21.
The biggest questions still remain: where the money will come from to allow poorer countries to power their growth through low-carbon energy, and how emissions will be monitored — and by whom.
The new document capped the first week of talks here, where 195 countries have been working to forge an agreement to lower carbon emissions and try to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. This version is the result of negotiations that began years ago, but took off with intensity when the international summit conference began on Monday.
In international legal documents like this, little words and phrases can have big consequences. In the case of the climate accord, perhaps the most crucial word is “shall.” In this forum, “shall” equals legally binding. So a great deal of the next week will be a showdown over “shalls.”
Developing economies want lots of “shalls” in the money section. In particular, they would like to see a clause saying that developed countries “shall” provide money for the developing world to adapt to climate change and transition to clean energy. That “shall” is a red alert for the United States, because it would legally commit developed countries, in an international legal forum, to writing checks to poor countries.
In the money section, the United States prefers the much softer “should.” This would lay out an expectation that rich countries will pay, but it would not come with legal teeth if they don’t.
The United States would also like to expand the pool of donor countries — it objects to a text that would require only “developed economies” to give money. That denotes a fairly small group of countries — mainly the United States, members of the European Union, Canada, Japan, Australia and a handful more. Those countries would like to see not just “developed economies” on the hook for giving money – they would like to see the more expansive language “countries in a position do so.” That would put larger developing countries like China and Brazil in the donor pool.
While the United States objects to “shalls” in the money section, it wants lots of “shalls” in the section on outside verification. It wants full legal force requiring countries to open up their industrial sectors to an outside review of how they record emissions. That’s where many developing economies would like to see the softer “should.”
Despite the differences on the table, negotiators said they saw common ground in sight. The Chinese negotiator Su Wei offered a metaphor for the process ahead. “When you cook a meal, you need all the materials and ingredients in the kitchen,” he said at a news briefing Saturday. “Everything must be there before you can make your meal. It’s the elements of Parisian cuisine. We have many ingredients, and we will emerge with a good meal.”