Paris UN Climate Conference 2015: Five Things We Learned On Day Four

Fairfax - Peter Hannam & Tom Arup, Paris

Visitors walk through ice blocks as part of the sculpture Ice Watch, by Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, as part of the Paris climate talks. Photo: Jacques Brinon

1: Of Smartflowers and Eiffel leaves
Summiteers lucky enough to slip out of the conference to take in some of the major sites of beauty in Paris may not dodge the issue of climate change.
Take the subway to the Hotel de Ville, the city's beautiful neo-Renaissance town halls ("with 108 statues of illustrious Parisians", the guidebook tells us), and the traveller will be met with posters declaring how 80 per cent of buses will be "electrique" by 2025 and the rest will run on "biogaz".
Those hoping to find the traditional ice-skating rink, which runs from December to early March, will, it seems, be disappointed. Such entertainment might send a mixed signal during a conference tackling a warming world. Advertisement
Luckily, the visitors can inspect an exhibition of technologies of the future, such as this "Smartflower", dubbed "the first intelligent photovoltaic generator".

Smartflower' on display at Cities for Climate exhibition in Paris.

Its 12 petals contain 18 square metres of solar panels that open to the sun and close down at dusk, and follow the golden orb in between. In a year, it can generate 4000 kw-hours of electricity or more than enough for a typical French household.
And while the Eiffel Tower has been used lately to symbolise peace amid the terrorist attacks, it can also send a decent ecological statement too:

A new take on the icon of Paris.

2: Ice rinks may be out, but ice is in – or at least until it melts
Olafur Eliasson​, an Danish-Icelandic (or is that "Ice-ish") artist has succeeded in taking a chunk of Greenland's ice sheet all the way to Paris to highlight what is happening to many of the world's great ice sheets and glaciers.
Eliasson told The Guardian that his installation was intended to serve as a memorial to the shrinking Arctic: "The ice we are going to put in Paris is a tenth of what melts in a second in the Greenland summer."
It is a way to make the data real, to make the facts emotionally potent, he told the British media outlet.
And it seems the ice made it to Paris, for a while at least:

10,000 year old ice from Greenland. Taking a Paris vacation.

3: Burning up cash
On the financial front, Carbon Tracker came out with a report warning that $US2 trillion ($2.7 trillion) of assets face being stranded if the world's nations took seriously the two degree warming limit they agreed to at Copenhagen six long years ago.
With Mr "Inconvenient Truth" – Former US Vice President Al Gore – on hand, the group argued that coal, oil and gas assets would in many cases be stranded at 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide limit for the atmosphere – a guideline for that 2-degree limit.
"Over $US2 trillion of capex needs to not be approved in order to avoid around 156 Gigatonnes of CO² of emissions – the equivalent of cutting supply and the subsequent emissions by around a quarter in the markets covered in this analysis," it said. (See table below of capex (investment) in US dollar terms.)

The group says its starkest finding is probably that all existing coal mines are sufficient to meet the 450 ppm scenario.
"It is the end of the road for expansion of the coal sector," it said, noting that China's coal demand has likely peaked and that India was becoming the main hope for coal exporters such as Australia and Indonesia.
How far India is likely go down the same coal path as China may well hinge on what happens in Paris over the next week or so.

4: What does a pavilion say about a nation?
At the Paris climate summit there are two halls where countries have been allowed to set up both offices and promotional areas for their climate plans.
A straw poll of the press room has India winning the most extravagant with its fountains and light shows.

India's display.

The United States has a giant planet (typical arrogant Americans think they own the world, am I right?), which is used by earnest scientists to explain how warming temperature will effect salmon spawning patters.

And then there is Australia.

If we were to be kind we'd call it a judicious use of tax payers' money reflecting the focus of the delegation on the negotiations and not glitzy show and tell.

5: Finally some action
After days of slow progress the United Nations climate negotiations finally reverted to form.
Developing nations were battling it out with industrialised ones over, well, pretty much everything. You can read more about it here.
If we assume the talks will end at 6pm on Friday week (and they really won't) then there are eight days left to get a whole new global climate change deal.
The clock is ticking.

Day 3 Paris Climate Talks: Tough And Uneven Progress

The Climate Institute - Erwin Jackson

The pace in Paris is picking up. Delegates are moving from meeting to meeting, negotiating on the elements of the agreement. Even big delegations are struggling to keep up.

We will not get a good sense of what will have been accomplished this week for a day or so but it is fair to say that progress is uneven. This is being driven by certain regressive countries in the Like Minded Developing Country group attempting to suck energy out of the process and weaken the effectiveness of a possible agreement. Saudi Arabia, a wealthy and diplomatically effective oil state, is the focus of much frustration.
Some areas outside the formal negotiations are moving forward, however.
The US has been proactively engaging with small island states on the issue of how to rebuild after severe and unavoidable loss and damage caused by climate change. Finding common ground on this issue would build trust between developed nations and the world’s most vulnerable countries.
Reaching agreement on how to provide financial support for the world’s poorest countries will be crucial to achieving more substantial progress in the coming week. To that end, developed country flexibility would be constructive on these issues:

• ensuring there are regular opportunities to pledge new financial commitments after 2020
• ensuring the current goal of US$100 billion of public and private finance by 2020 is the floor for future contributions
• ensuring the majority of public financing is used to help countries adapt to increasing impacts of climate change

Flexibility in these areas could help unlock more constructive engagement from developing countries on regular updates of national emissions targets, greater transparency of the actions countries are taking through measuring, reporting and verification (MRV), and greater finance contributions from emerging economies in the future.
Finally, The Climate Institute has looked at Australia’s 2030 per capita emissions compared to other developed and G20 countries. Meeting the government’s 2030 target could see our per capita emissions fall to 16 tonnes - still much higher than other developed countries, and the highest of any G20 country, aside from Saudi Arabia.
*The LMDC negotiating consists of developing nations that represent nearly half of the world's poor. It includes Algeria, Argentina, Bolivia, China, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, India, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia Sri Lanka and Venezuala.

France, Cop 21: Hunt’s Carelessness Forces Australia Into Damage Control

Renew Economy - Giles Parkinson

Australian environment minister Greg Hunt ran the gauntlet of committing a significant faux pas on Tuesday, forcing the Australian delegation into damage control for fear of derailing the critical Paris climate talks.
Hunt strayed from strict diplomatic discipline at a news conference in the afternoon – on the otherwise benign topic of a new document outlining Australia’s national climate resilience and adaptation strategy, and Australia’s contribution to “blue carbon”.
But the big problem came when Hunt was asked about progress of negotiations and the development of a new text that will form the basis of a Paris agreement in more than a week’s time.
This is a highly sensitive issue. The G77 in particularly, is paranoid about the prospect of a text being held in reserve by the French hosts, as it was to disastrous effect by the Danes in Copenhagen, and in negotiations in Bonn just a few weeks ago.
France has insisted that there is “no plan B”, i.e. no hidden text, and said it would work with whatever it receives from the co-chairs of the main negotiation stream this weekend. This language has been scrupulously observed by the Australian delegation.
Until this afternoon, when Hunt invited speculation of the hidden text by saying that the French were already consulting with other parties with the view of forming a text over the weekend. He described the work of the negotiating stream as a sort of “options paper”.
Nothing would be more sure of inflating the emotions of the G77 and deepening the divide between the developed and developing world. RenewEconomy and The Guardian sought confirmation from the French negotiating team, who again flatly denied the existence of a different text.
The Australian team was then into damage control, sparking a flurry of calls that basically conceded that Hunt had misspoken , and had intended only to convey that the text would ‘evolve” from that presented by the co-chairs and text is more an options paper than a text.

Hunt had earlier insisted that Australia was working a s a broker between two parties over the inclusion of a reference to a 1.5C target – demanded by more than 100 countries but resisted by large developed and developing economies – and the definition of what decarbonisation or carbon neutrality might mean and when.
That may well be the role that Australia would like to be seen playing. But Hunt’s carelessness, or as the French might politely say, a mal entendu, risked great harm in talks that are already on a knife-edge and racing into a tight deadline. He should have known better.

Is Australia ready for climate refugees?
A new study suggests that migration is already occurring in Pacific islands such as Tuvalu and Kiribati, with up to one quarter saying climate change was a factor.
It also found that more than 70 per cent of households in Kiribati and Tuvalu and 35% in Nauru felt that migration would be a likely response if droughts, seal level rise or floods worsened. But only a quarter of households in these countries, believe they have the financial means to migrate. That means the potential for refugees.
When asked about this, Hunt said: “That is something we will deal with as and when it arises. We will seek to avoid that problem for sake of environment and the sake of humanity. I don’t want to pre-empt or set out a position.”

The $1.2 trillion investment switch in the lead up to Paris
It seems that global investment funds have got the message about the importance of the Paris climate talks, and the inevitability of a big switch from fossil fuel investment to clean technologies that can usher in a decarbonised world.
In the 10 weeks before the Paris climate talks began on Monday, some 100 institutions representing $US800 million ($A1.1 trillion) made a commitment to divest from fossil fuels. Not all of those funds, mind you, but a portion. But that is a significant start.
According to two organisation co-ordinating the campaign, 350.org and Divest-Invest, this takes the total in the last 12 months to $US3.4 trillion ($A4.7 trillion) – representing an extraordinary shift in investment funds from old and polluting businesses to new, clean technologies.
And these businesses are not just doing this as a simply moral decision. As the Bank of England governor Mark Carney said earlier this year, there is a real risk of trillions of dollars of investments becoming stranded assets as climate change issues and the plunging cost of renewable energy technologies turn conventional business model upside down. (See Jon Walter’s story for more details here).

Shell’s sexist ad compares solar and wind to lonely women
This ad below has to be seen to be believed. Posted just over a month ago on Shell’s “make the future” marketing page, this 90 second video compares wind and solar to a lonely women, unable to cope when the wind dies and the sun sets.
What women really need, the ad says, is a man – reliable, predictable and long lasting. Shell calls the man “natural gas” and dubs the video “a beautiful relationship”. The film is in French, with English sub-titles, presumably to highlight the romance of it all, and in anticipation of the Paris climate talks.
It is quite breath-taking – not just the sexism, but the gratuitous comparisons. One, that a woman cannot function without a man, and that wind and solar need natural gas. I showed it to a few people who couldn’t quite believe their eyes.