Paris 2015: Momentum For Climate Change Deal Grows As Obama Joins Xi At UN Talks

Fairfax - Alex Morales, Bloomberg

Paris climate talks: the issues
Climate change is starting to have a personal impact on billions of people and we need to cut back on greenhouse gases and adapt to a warmer world.

More than 140 world leaders including US President Barack Obama and Xi Jinping of China are gathering in Paris for France's biggest diplomatic event since 1948, striving to reach the first truly global deal to curb greenhouse gases.
The two weeks of United Nations-sponsored talks have already gathered pledges to reduce emissions from 177 of the 195 countries involved, signalling broader support for a deal than when envoys last attempted to reach one six years ago. Those discussions in Copenhagen ended in disarray with recriminations between industrialised and developing nations.

World leaders at this month's G20 leaders summit in Turkey. They will be together again in Paris on Monday to discuss climate change. Photo: Aykut Unlupinar

Now, with the cost of alternatives to fossil fuels coming down and scientific concern about global warming mounting, there's stronger political will to act than ever. Delegates open their discussions on Sunday, and leaders are scheduled to speak on Monday to lend political momentum to the process.
"The stars are more aligned right now to reach agreement than I have ever seen them," US Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern told reporters last week. "We are riding on the wave of those 170 targets that have been submitted."
The terrorist attacks that killed 130 people in Paris two weeks ago prompted authorities to cancel demonstrations planned by environmental groups, draining some of the colour from the event that had been expected to draw 60,000 people to the city. Political resolve for a deal remains.
"What a powerful rebuke to the terrorists it will be when the world stands as one," Obama said last week in a press conference with French President Francois Hollande.
Disagreements remain on the legal nature of the deal,??the mechanism that will prod action in the future and on how much support industrial nations should give poorer countries to cut their emissions and cope with the effects of warming. The leaders depart after their speeches, leaving the thorny issues to envoys drawn mostly from environment and energy ministries.
"Climate finance is a deal-killer in Paris," said Jairam Ramesh, the former environment minister of India and a veteran of Copenhagen. Industrialised nations must show how they'll deliver on a promise first made in 2009 to boost annual climate aid to $100 billion by the end of the century, he said.
Adding urgency is a finding by the World Meteorological Organisation that global temperatures probably touched a record in 2015. The pledges - which aren't up for negotiation - leave the world on track for a 2.7 degree Celsius increase since the industrial revolution, according to Climate Action Tracker, a project by four climate research institutions. That's above the 2-degree target set in previous talks, a shift in the climate that would still be quicker than when the last ice age ended. The most vulnerable nations want a 1.5-degree goal to protect them from rising seas.
"We're not home and dry in terms of the the 2 degrees, but developing countries are not seeing the money they need in order to cope with the consequences of that shortcoming," said former UN climate chief Yvo de Boer, who led the Copenhagen talks and now heads the Global Green Growth Institute in Seoul.
Another fight on the agenda in Paris will be on how to ensure countries periodically "ratchet" upward their ambition to reduce pollution, said Laurence Tubiana, who as France's climate change ambassador will help steer the discussions. Envoys must deliver "a broad message on the low-carbon economy being the new normal."
It's not just countries that are mobilising. The UN has gathered pledges to fight climate change from more than 2,000 cities worldwide and more than 2,000 corporations, which will be on display at conferences drawing thousands to venues separate from the heavily-policed UN compound.
"Paris will be a watershed," said Steve Howard, chief sustainability officer of the Swedish furniture retailer Ikea. "It will be a dividing point in time between the fossil-fuel economy and the renewables era."
The enthusiasm for a deal is in contrast with the meeting in Copenhagen in 2009, when just 55 nations met a deadline to submit pledges. This time, envoys coordinated their positions and put many of the elements for the deal in place before arriving in Paris.
The U.S. persuaded its allies and China to back a voluntary approach on emissions cuts rather than a deal setting binding targets. That construction would allow the administration to bypass approval from a hostile Senate, though it's causing friction with island nations and the Europeans, with Hollande saying earlier in the month "we must give any accord a binding character."
"Our survival is based on coming to a good enough deal," Maldives Foreign Minister Dunya Maumoon said by phone. It must ensure "there are still opportunities for countries to come back with more ambitious targets."

Paris Talks Could Improve Climate Pledges

Climate Central - John Upton

Until recently, global climate negotiations resembled wards full of newborn babies. Everybody seemed awfully upset about something, but with little idea what to do about it. Now the kids are growing. And they’ve been handing in their homework. What happens to that homework as countries’ climate policies mature could mean the difference between a humanity that’s afflicted by climate change, or one that’s devastated by it.

Wind energy produces nearly no greenhouse gas pollution. Credit: NREL

The way that countries will move together to act on climate in the coming years may start to become clear during the next two weeks in Paris, which is hosting what could be the most important round of United Nations climate negotiations in history.
Following years of failed efforts to force specific climate pollution reductions on developed countries, most nations completed unprecedented climate assignments this year, which they submitted to the U.N. They drafted climate pledges, which are known as intended nationally determined contributions, or INDCs. These INDCs describe high-level, but mostly underwhelming, targets for reducing or easing the amount of climate pollution that's being released.
“The INDCs have lots of flaws right now,” said David Victor, a University of California at San Diego international relations professor who researches climate diplomacy. “They are a start.”
Next, governments aim to work together to build their climate pledges into a fragmented but cohesive global plan for slowing global warming and, to a lesser extent, for adapting to it.
That work begins Sunday with the start of this year’s major session of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. One of the key issues to be decided is how and when the INDCs will be reviewed. Some are proposing reviews of INDCs every three to five years, making the pledges relatively dynamic, helping them keep pace with energy industry advances. Others favor a more measured approach — perhaps with once-in-a-decade reviews for some or all pledges.
“Review needs, ideally, to look not just at the big picture but the details — what’s working and not,” Victor said. “There are countries and firms willing to do things but not sure, right now, what works and how to link different policy efforts in different jurisdictions over time. So they are trying stuff and learning.”
America’s six-page INDC promises a 26 percent reduction in annual climate pollution from 2005 to 2025, for example. The European Union has pledged to reduce its climate impacts 40 percent by 2030, compared with 1990 levels. China is pledging to halt its yearly growth in climate-changing emissions 15 years from now at latest. India’s pledge quotes Mahatma Gandhi, discusses “climate justice,” poverty and population growth, and describes how it will promote nuclear and renewable energy.
While the pledges and approaches differ substantially, a collective examination of them makes it clear they won’t be enough to avoid dangerous levels of warming.
Analysis has revealed that the targets in the pledges will set the world up for more warming than the climate negotiators’ goal of a 2°C, or 3.6°F, limit. Industrial activity has already warmed the Earth by 1°C, and island states and other countries most threatened by rising seas want a 1.5°C target adopted in Paris.
“If the current targets are locked in through 2030, then we have a major problem,” said Jake Schmidt, who monitors climate negotiations for the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council.
Countries were “conservative” in setting their targets, Schmidt said. “Technology development, implementation ability, and political will etc., will make it easier for them to do more before 2030 than they could envision at this moment.”
Most countries’ climate pledges cover a 10-year period after 2020. Those by the U.S. and Mexico, by contrast, cover 2020 to 2025.

U.S. climate negotiator Todd Stern, left, and his boss, Secretary of State John Kerry, at climate negotiations in Peru last year. Credit: UNFCCC/flickr

“Our view was that a shorter target — a 5-year target, rather than 10 — would actually enhanceambition,” President Obama’s chief climate negotiator, Todd Stern, said during a U.S. State Department press briefing on Tuesday. “In 2020, we will be able to put forward a target for 2030 much stronger than we would be able to do if we were trying to kind of guess on what a 2030 target would look like now.”
The different approaches to INDC cycles are reflective of different ideas for how the pledges could be reviewed and updated in the years ahead. The proposed evaluation approach is being calling a “ratcheting mechanism,” because it could help ratchet up the ambitions that underpin the climate pledges.
In Paris, the U.S. will be pushing for all countries to adopt 5-year INDC and INDC review cycles. India, frustrated that it’s being called upon to curb its substantial overall climate pollution while its per-person impacts remain low, and wary of inquisitions from the West, wants to wait a decade or so before its INDC is subjected to an initial review. During the negotiations, the U.S. will be trying to allay those concerns, which it fears could stunt the development of a climate-friendly humanity.
“Nobody is thinking here of a punitive review — that wouldn’t fly,” Stern said. Instead, he said he supports the concept of “a strong facilitative review that looks at what a country has done and says, ‘That looks good, you’re on track,’ or, ‘That doesn’t look so good. How can you be helped to do better?”’

Related

• The Forgotten U.N. Climate Goal: 1.5°C
• 50 Years After Warning, No Debate in Paris on the Science
• Climate Accord Struck In Lima; Key Decisions Postponed 

UN Climate Change Conference: The Babel Tower Comes To Paris

Forbes - Jean-Pierre Lehmann

Tower of Babel painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1556)

When I began teaching as Visiting Professor in the MBA program at the University of Hong Kong in February 2012 I had entitled the course “Asia in the New Global Order”. At the first class one of the students asked, “Order? What Order?” Good point, I noted, and the course was re-titled “Asia in the New Global Disorder”. It is the title that has been used in Hong Kong since, but also of the courses I have been teaching at NIIT University in Rajasthan, India, and the theme for my Forbes blog.
Asia which extends from the Red Sea to the East China Sea and across the Indian Ocean to the Pacific is the continent where the main narrative of the 21st century will be written. It is a continent many parts of which (especially in East Asia) are experiencing dynamic developments, but, as I argued in a previous blog, it is also a continent in turmoil.
Asia is a continent in turmoil geopolitically, politically, socially, economically, ideologically, culturally, demographically, but also, and emphatically so, environmentally. Selecting randomly recent news items: Singapore and Malaysia have been once again choked by the (euphemistically called) “haze” due to arising from forest fires in Indonesia; prospects of Bangladesh (population 160 million) sinking due to rising global warming induced rising sea levels are real; New Delhi has acquired the dubious distinction of beating Beijing as the world’s most polluted city; while urban China continues to fester, causing, among other things, an exodus to brighter skies of some of the country’s brightest brains at a time when they are most needed to confront the many challenges the country is facing; an article by Simon Kuper in the Financial Times quotes from a report entitled “Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought” that the Syrian civil war was at least in part caused by the extremely severe droughts the country experienced from 2007 to 2010 forcing “1.5 million Syrians to abandon their farms and move to already dysfunctional cities”; etc
Just a quick addendum on the situation in Syria and the Levant generally: while political scientists see no end of armed conflict in the short or medium term, environmentalists note that climate change conditions will, on the basis of currents trends, get significantly worse. The consequences could ineed be awesomely awful – eg in dramatically increased climate change induced refugees.
All this is happening – and much more – at a time when the global governance architecture that prevailed for five decades following the end of World War II, and successfully maintained the peace during the cold war, is breaking down. The system led to significant increases in prosperity in various parts of the world – notably the stellar economic rise from acute poverty to comfortable prosperity of the four East Asian dragons, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, that could never have even been dreamed of had the global rules-based architecture, especially in respect to the trade regime, not been solidly in place.
Paris today (Climate Change) and Nairobi tomorrow (WTO Doha ministerial meeting) will painfully illustrate the truism that since the beginning of the 21st century we have a system of global governance that has been reduced to a sham. The show goes on, but it is devoid of content.
The opening lines of Shakespeare’s poem seem highly apt to describe contemporary global governance: “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances”; as indeed the concluding lines give a powerful foreboding of where things will be after Paris CoP21: “Last scene of all, … Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”.
It was in 2003 when I was in Cancún attending the WTO ministerial meeting (the first to be held after the launch of the Doha Development Agenda) that I was struck by the imagery of the Tower of Babel. All the ministers were talking, none were listening, hence there was no understanding – hence the meeting collapsed and hence ministers left “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”.
[The image of the Tower of Babel is all the more relevant to our theme of “Asia in the New Global Disorder”, as Babel was located in Asia, believed by archeologists to have been in Shinar in northwestern Syria, then known as Mesopotamia.]
The same imagery applies – in spades – to the so-called UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC); my Hong Kong student might well ask, “Framework? What framework?” A trivial pursuit question might well be: “in what major city of the world has there not been a climate change summit?” As Paris 2015 will mark the 21st (and the 22nd is already scheduled for Marrakesh in 2016), previous summits (in chronological order) were held in: Berlin, Geneva, Kyoto, Buenos Aires, Bonn, The Hague, Bonn, Marrakesh, New Delhi, Milan, Buenos Aires, Montreal, Nairobi, Bali, Poznan, Copenhagen, Cancún, Durban, Doha, Warsaw, and, last year, Lima.
Readers will recall that the 2009 Copenhagen summit was especially cacophonous, a real venomous bust-up along lines drawn between North and South. The Copenhagen disaster was to be followed by Cancún. At an international conference prior to the event I asked the then Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa Cantellano, since the consequences of Copenhagen had not yet been digested and expectations that Cancún would produce something substantial were zero (or below), why simply not cancel the meeting and thereby save money and especially energy?! She looked at me in shock. The very thought of cancelling a summit, even when it is known that nothing will happen, is blasphemy.
When I argue that these summits (not just UNFCC, but also WTO, G-20, etc) should be stopped and other formulas sought I often have Winston Churchill quoted back at me, “to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war”. But I do not think Churchill had the Tower of Babel in mind!

Besides, these negotiations are undertaken not in a spirit of cooperation, but of confrontation: to score points, “defend national interests”, and the usual mercantilist crap we hear ad nauseam.
The facts here (for once!) seem reasonably clear and on the issue of climate change I am a southerner. There has never been a “green industrial revolution”. As the rich countries got rich, they generated infernal pollution. Once they are rich, they become more environmentally conscious. Show me an exception! This is true, for example, of South Korea, which was renowned for its terrible industrial smog. Today (with a GDP per capita of some $35k) the air is clear and fish have returned to swim in the Han River.
If we want the developing countries from Asia (and other continents) to limit emissions and diminish environmental degradation, the north has a historical, moral and human obligation to transfer as much technology and capital as possible to achieve that end which is imperative not only for Asia but indeed for the entire planet. As we stupidly and vacuously squabble at the Tower of Babel, things continue to deteriorate at accelerated speed.
For the sake of all our children and grand-children, South and North, East and West, we need not to negotiate, but to brainstorm on constructive global solutions to this epic global challenge. If Paris could produce this kind of mindset change and resolution, it would be truly wonderful.