Climate deal hailed as fossil fuels turning point An emotional French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius presents a landmark global climate accord, calling it a "historic" measure for turning the tide on global warming.
With the Paris summit wrapping up having delivered an historic global climate agreement, questions will inevitably turn to whether Malcolm Turnbull will use the international momentum to advance the climate debate back home.
For half a decade, Australia has been stuck in a fact-free debate on climate policy - one that has seen one of the biggest challenges the world faces turned into a domestic political chew toy.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull addresses the Paris climate conference nearly two weeks ago. Photo: AP
But where the failure at Copenhagen helped derailed Kevin Rudd's climate ambition back in 2009, success in Paris presents the opposite opportunity for Turnbull, who many believe has a deep desire to move to a more robust climate policy.
The excuse presented for inaction for so long - that the world is not acting - no longer holds water. And the deal struck in Paris is going to require Australia, and all countries, to take on more responsibility to meet its long-term goals.
For a start, Australia has to review its emissions targets. It has set what is widely regarded to be a low-ball goal of cutting emissions by 26-28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. The government has known it may have to lift this under the Paris deal, and has been preparing for it by signalling it will allow the use of international carbon markets - representing cuts effectively in poorer countries paid for by Australia - from 2017. The Paris deal supports international carbon trading.
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull arriving at the Paris climate summit last month Photo: Ella Pellegrini
Deeper cuts will also require a bigger re-think of domestic policies - Australia will not be able to rely on the current combination of paying some farmers and businesses to cut emissions, carbon accounting fiddles and falling demand for electricity.
It will have to find a way to finally address pollution from the country's fleet of large, ageing coal-fired power plants. Emissions from coal have been rising since the Coalition abolished the national carbon price scheme.
The government's direct action scheme is not fit for this job - at least not as currently designed. It will need a radical overhaul, perhaps one that would make it look more like a type of emissions trading scheme.
Activists gather near the Eiffel Tower on the final day of the Paris conference. Photo: AP
This is the kind of debate business has been crying out for, and will be even more now there is global deal signalling the long-term phase out of fossil fuels.
How fast Turnbull can move, assuming he wants to, is an open question. Labor has promised a more ambitious approach, which creates opportunities for bipartisanship, but he will have to overcome roadblocks in his own party.
Turnbull knew this when he spoke alongside about 150 world leaders on the first day of the Paris summit nearly two weeks ago, giving a carefully balanced speech with one eye on the politics back home.
It was strange to see a political leader who understands the climate change dilemma so well - remember, this is a man who gave notes to Ross Garnaut as he prepared his landmark global warming reviews - unable to give a full throated account of it on the world stage because of a small rump of climate sceptics back home.
We will soon find out whether two weeks on, and one historic agreement later, Turnbull feels the world has moved enough to take a few brave steps forward.
The accord "saves the chance of saving the planet," says one advocate.
Francois Mori/AP
After two weeks of tense talks, word-wrangling and marathon overnight meetings, diplomats in Paris agreed to a global climate change accord on Saturday evening -- a day after the summit's scheduled conclusion.
Leaders and experts cheered the historic agreement that emerged from the 21st Conference of the Parties, or COP21, calling it ambitious and realistic, and a crucial step in protecting the Earth for future generations.
"The decisive deal for the planet is here," French President François Hollande told delegates Saturday morning, shortly before releasing the final draft. Outside, thousands of protesters had begun filling Paris streets in an appeal for a strong climate pact.
Some advocates, however, lamented that the deal falls short. They pointed to a lack of a specific timescale for phasing out fossil fuels, for example, as well as weak language on monitoring and verifying countries' greenhouse gas emission reductions.
"This agreement won't save the planet, not even close," Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, a climate advocacy group, told The Huffington Post in an email. "But it's possible that it saves the chance of saving the planet -- if movements push even harder from here on out."
Activists demonstrate near the Eiffel Tower in Paris on Saturday, Dec.12, 2015, during COP21. ASSOCIATED PRESS
Still, no one seems to be denying that the accord represents a major milestone, especially after more than two decades of United Nations climate talks that broadly failed in their chief objective to stabilize the warming of the atmosphere.
For the first time, rich and poor countries across the world have agreed to take steps to limit and adapt to climate change -- from reducing their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to helping one another adapt to rising seas, devastating droughts, food shortages and other impacts of global warming.
As the Paris text states, climate change "represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet," and "requires the widest possible cooperation by all countries."
The final agreement, which spans 31 pages, sets a cap on global warming at "well below" 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. Any greater rise, scientists have warned, could trigger catastrophic climate change. The text also adds an aspirational commitment to aim for even greater reductions, enough to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and thereby help protect low-lying nations most threatened by sea level rise.
"The scientific evidence coming in, particularly since the release of the last IPCC report, really does point in the direction that 2 degrees Celsius of warming presents more risks than had been widely appreciated," said Guido Schmidt-Traub, executive director of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network, referencing the most recent findings from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose assessments form the scientific backbone for climate negotiations.
But perhaps the greater debate these past weeks in Paris is just how to achieve either goal. The current set of emissions-reduction pledges submitted by participating countries would only limit global warming to roughly 2.7 degrees Celsius (4.9 degrees Fahrenheit), leaving a substantial gap -- regardless of which warming limit is considered. And the Paris text doesn't hide that fact, stating that "much greater emission reduction efforts will be required."
We're at a moment in time where the issue of climate change has registered so centrally in the consciousness of people around the world.
Rachel Cleetus of the Union of Concerned Scientists' Climate and Energy Program
Michael Mann, director of Penn State University's Earth System Science Center, emphasized that COP21 is just "the beginning of a process." The global commitments "get us roughly half way" to where the world needs to be, Mann told HuffPost in an email. "The most important thing to come out of the conference is an agreement to improve on these commitments substantially in the years ahead."
Robert Stavins, director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, agreed. He highlighted the accord's call for countries to review their annual emissions and ramp up their pledges accordingly every five years, beginning in 2023. Also key, he noted, is the fact that nearly 190 countries, representing 96 percent of global emissions, have submitted Intended Nationally Determined Contributions -- a significant improvement compared to the Kyoto Protocol's coverage of 14 percent of global emissions. That climate accord only obliged developed countries to pitch in. What's more, major carbon contributors such as the U.S. and China refused to sign on.
The shift from previous summits may be at least partially attributed to mounting scientific evidence and global awareness concerning the pace of and problems posed by climate change. And this change in tone is not just evident in the actions of the public and politicians, suggested Schmidt-Traub, but also of major corporations. Monsanto, for example, is among companies pledging to go carbon neutral within the next decade. "That's making a huge difference," he said.
"We're at a moment in time where the issue of climate change has registered so centrally in the consciousness of people around the world," added Rachel Cleetus, the lead economist and climate policy manager for the Union of Concerned Scientists' Climate and Energy Program. "These climate impacts we are seeing are exacting a toll on people everywhere. We're seeing the western U.S. in a multiyear drought. We're seeing sea level rise cause worsening flooding."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, left, talks with China's Special Representative on Climate Change Xie Zhenhua prior to the opening of the COP21 conference in Le Bourget on Saturday, Dec.12, 2015. ASSOCIATED PRESS
While every country may be confronted by climate change consequences, some developing nations represent the most vulnerable to and least able to cope with the impacts. These countries are also generally the least prepared to invest in renewable energy to help fend off further warming. Compared to fossil fuels, clean energy products remain more capital intensive -- a particular challenge for poor nations that face high interest rates. (A loan to India, for example, is far more risky than one to Germany.)
To help, rich countries have been called to provide $100 billion a year to support poor countries in their transitions to clean energy and their measures to adapt to climate change. By 2025, according to the agreement, these nations will revisit that figure, with the option of ratcheting up their financing.
The accord also includes a mechanism to address the losses and damages caused by climate change, although the parties agreed that this "does not involve or provide a basis for any liability of compensation." Such liability would have been a deal-breaker for the U.S. and other large emitters, according to Stavins, who suggested that the new climate accord "hit everything" he had been watching for ahead of the meetings.
"This is a broad foundation for meaningful progress," he said. "Anyone who suggests this is a success or a failure is only speaking based on ideology, not reality. Only 10 to 20 years from now, when we look at the implementation of all this, will we really know."
The former NASA scientist criticizes the talks, intended to reach a new global deal on cutting carbon emissions beyond 2020, as ‘no action, just promises’
‘Many of the conservatives know climate change is not a hoax,’ James Hansen says. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian
Mere mention of the Paris climate talks is enough to make James Hansen grumpy. The former Nasa scientist, considered the father of global awareness of climate change, is a soft-spoken, almost diffident Iowan. But when he talks about the gathering of nearly 200 nations, his demeanor changes.
"It's a fraud really, a fake," he says, rubbing his head. "It's just bullshit for them to say: 'We'll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.' It's just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned."
The talks, intended to reach a new global deal on cutting carbon emissions beyond 2020, have spent much time and energy on two major issues: whether the world should aim to contain the temperature rise to 1.5C or 2C above preindustrial levels, and how much funding should be doled out by wealthy countries to developing nations that risk being swamped by rising seas and bashed by escalating extreme weather events.
But, according to Hansen, the international jamboree is pointless unless greenhouse gas emissions aren't taxed across the board. He argues that only this will force down emissions quickly enough to avoid the worst ravages of climate change. Paris talks overlooking immediate threats, say climate change activists
Hansen, 74, has just returned from Paris where he again called for a price to be placed on each tonne of carbon from major emitters (he's suggested a "fee" – because "taxes scare people off" – of $15 a tonne that would rise $10 a year and bring in $600bn in the US alone). There aren't many takers, even among "big green" as Hansen labels environment groups.
Hansen has been a nagging yet respected voice on climate change since he shot to prominence in the summer of 1988. The Nasa scientists, who had been analyzing changes in the Earth's climate since the 1970s, told a congressional committee that something called the "greenhouse effect" where heat-trapped gases are released into the atmosphere was causing global warming with a 99% certainty.
A New York Times report of the 1988 testimony includes the radical suggestion that there should be a "sharp reduction in the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels that release carbon dioxide", a plea familiar to those who have watched politicians who have traipsed up to the lectern or interviewer's microphone in Paris over the past two weeks.
After that, things started to get a little difficult for Hansen. He claims the White House altered subsequent testimony, given in 1989, and that Nasa appointed a media overseer who vetted what he said to the press. They held practice press conferences where any suggestion that fossil fuels be reduced was considered political and unscientific, and therefore should not be uttered.
"Scientists are trained to be objective," Hansen says. "I don't think we should be prevented for talking about the the implications of science." He retired from Nasa in 2013. "That was a source of friction. I held on longer than I wanted, by a year or two. I was in my 70s, it was time for someone else to take over. Now I feel a lot better."
A man rides his bicycle on yellow paint poured on the street during a protest by activists from environmental group Greenpeace on the Champs-Elysee in Paris. Photograph: Christophe Ena/AP
From being possibly America's most celebrated scientist, Hansen is now probably its most prominent climate activist. He's been arrested several times in protests outside the White House over mining and the controversial Keystone pipeline extension.
He is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University. When he's in New York, he lives near the campus, surrounded by books piled on groaning shelves. Hansen's not slowing down – he's involved in a climate lobbying group and still undertakes the sort of scientific endeavor which helps maintain his gravitas.
One particular paper, released in July, painted a particularly bleak future for just about anyone living near the coast. Hansen and 16 colleagues found that Earth's huge ice sheets, such as those found in Greenland, are melting faster than expected, meaning that even the 2C warming limit is "highly dangerous".
The sea level could soon be up to five meters higher than it is today by the latter part of this century, unless greenhouse gases aren't radically slashed, the paper states. This would inundate many of the world's cities, including London, New York, Miami and Shanghai.
"More than half of the world's cities of the world are at risk," Hansen says. "If you talk to glaciologists privately they will tell you they are very concerned we are locking in much more significant sea level rises than the ice sheet models are telling us.
"The economic cost of a business as usual approach to emissions is incalculable. It will become questionable whether global governance will break down. You're talking about hundreds of million of climate refugees from places such as Pakistan and China. We just can't let that happen. Civilization was set up and developed with a stable, constant coastline."
The paper has yet to be fully peer reviewed and some of Hansen's colleagues, including his protege at Nasa, Gavin Schmidt, have voiced their doubts whether sea level rise will be quite this bad, with the IPCC projecting up to a meter by 2100.
Brickbats are thrown in a bipartisan way. Hansen feels Obama, who has made climate change a legacy issue in his final year in office, has botched the opportunity to tackle the issue.
"We all foolishly had such high hopes for Obama, to articulate things, to be like Roosevelt and have fireside chats to explain to the public why we need to have a rising fee on carbon in order to move to clean energy," he says. "But he's not particularly good at that. He didn't make it a priority and now it's too late for him."
Hansen is just as scathing of leading Republicans who have embraced climate science denialism to the chagrin of some party elders.
Leading presidential candidates Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Ben Carson have all derided evidence that the world is warming due to human activity while Ted Cruz, another contender, has taken time out from his campaign to to sit on an inquiry into climate science that has heard testimony from a rightwing radio host who has no scientific background.
"It's all embarrassing really," Hansen says. "After a while you realise as a scientist that politicians don't act rationally.
"Many of the conservatives know climate change is not a hoax. But those running for president are hamstrung by the fact they think they can't get the nomination if they say this is an issue. They wouldn't get money from the fossil fuel industry."
There is a positive note to end on, however. Global emissions have somewhat stalled and Hansen believes China, the world's largest emitter, will now step up to provide the leadership lacking from the US. A submerged Fifth Avenue and deadly heatwaves aren't an inevitability.
"I think we will get there because China is rational," Hansen says. "Their leaders are mostly trained in engineering and such things, they don't deny climate change and they have a huge incentive, which is air pollution. It's so bad in their cities they need to move to clean energies. They realise it's not a hoax. But they will need co-operation."
Climate policy is no longer something that can be papered over, or worked around, or ignored, or used as a political attack weapon
Coal operations at the Port of Newcastle: We will have to retire the old brown coal-fired generators and reduce industrial carbon pollution. Photograph: William West/AFP/Getty Images
Surely Australia can use this Paris climate agreement to finally end the barren, wasted years of climate policy war.
There's already an uneasy ceasefire, a letup in the mind-numbing slogans. Labor is promising some kind of emissions trading scheme and a relatively ambitious renewable energy target – but no details yet lest it once again feel the barrage of a full bore axe-the-tax scare campaign. Under the sceptical gaze of his party's hard right, Malcolm Turnbull is also unwilling to even hint at the policy changes he and his minister Greg Hunt appear to be planning when they revise Australia's policy after the election.
But now the world has entered a binding agreement – imperfect and incomplete in parts – but absolutely clear on one thing: all countries have agreed to reduce their greenhouse emissions and keep reducing them.
That has some very big implications for Australia.
We will be under pressure to revise our emission reduction target out to 2030 – the one we brought to Paris – by 2020. Given that we are among the world's highest per capita emitters and our target has been rated inadequate by the Climate Tracker think tank and other analysts, we are going to be under strong pressure to increase its ambition.
To meet even the current target, and certainly a higher one, we will have to get real about emission reductions, including from electricity generation. We will have to find a way to retire the old brown coal-fired generators and start reducing industrial carbon pollution. Australian business and environment groups are begging political parties to come up with some kind of stable, sensible plan. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and multiple heads of state in Paris think the best policy is a carbon price, using Paris to launch the carbon pricing leadership coalition. Greg Hunt spent his time in Paris continuing to pretend that his emissions reduction fund (ERF) is a carbon price and also an idea being adopted around the word, but the experts, when asked, said reverse auctions like the ERF were useful additions to a carbon price, but not a good primary policy to drive down greenhouse emissions. The bottom line is that if we are to meet our 2030 target, the ERF is not going to cut it.
Fossil fuel use will continue to decline. It won't stop; even with their accelerating rollout of renewables, India and China are still building coal-fired power stations. But as renewables get cheaper and countries actively shift away from fossil fuels, any government backing for the infrastructure needed by big new coal mines appears increasingly misguided.
The smart investment will be in clean technologies, and if Turnbull wants to be active and nimble and innovative and get a slice of it, he needs a credible, clear, transparent domestic climate policy, and quickly. That's exactly what Jie Zhang, from Chinese firm Hareon Solar, told me he is looking for when deciding whether to make a billion dollar investment in Australia next year.
We won't get away with using accounting rules to reach our emission-reduction pledges for much longer. Five big developed countries announced in Paris that they had voluntarily cancelled emission reduction "credits" achieved by overshooting their first Kyoto protocol greenhouse targets – the same kind of credits Australia is banking to boast it has already "met and beaten" its international pledges. The Paris agreement "encourages parties to promote the voluntary cancellation … of units issued under the Kyoto protocol, including certified emissions reductions that are valid for the second commitment period". Australia says it is going to ignore that encouragement, but the fact that this statement is in the deal indicates that we are unlikely to get to pull the same swifty in the future.
We are also going to be under pressure to stump up more money to help vulnerable countries cope with the impacts of climate change. The government fudged this in Paris, saying it would provide at least $200m a year – which appears to be a figure arrived at by adding up what we are already providing. Canada, by contrast, promised $2.5bn.
President Obama said the historic agreement is a tribute to American climate change leadership. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS.
LE BOURGET, France — With the sudden bang of a gavel Saturday night, representatives of 195 countries reached a landmark climate accord that will, for the first time, commit nearly every country to lowering planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions to help stave off the most drastic effects of climate change.
Delegates who have been negotiating intensely in this Paris suburb for two weeks gathered for the final plenary session, where Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius of France asked for opposition to the deal and, hearing none, declared it approved.
With that, the delegates achieved what had been unreachable for two decades: a consensus on the need to shift from carbon-based fuels and a road map for the 195 nations to do so.
Though the deal did not achieve all that environmentalists, scientists and some countries had hoped for, it set the table for more efforts to slow the slide toward irreversible changes to the Earth’s climate.
President Obama said on Saturday from the Cabinet Room at the White House, “The American people should be proud” of the landmark climate accord because it offered “the best chance we’ve had to save the one planet we’ve got.”
Mr. Obama added, “I believe this moment can be a turning point for the world.”
It was an extraordinary effort at global diplomacy. Supporters argued that no less than the future of the planet was at stake, and in the days before the final session, they tried relentlessly to persuade skeptical nations.
As they headed into the cavernous hall late Saturday, representatives of individual countries and blocs expressed support for a deal hammered out in a final overnight session on Friday. After a day of stops and starts, Mr. Fabius, the president of the climate conference, declared a consensus and struck the gavel at 7:26 p.m., abruptly closing formal proceedings that had threatened to go into the night.
The hall erupted in cheers as leaders like Secretary of State John Kerry and former Vice President Al Gore stood to applaud President François Hollande of France; his ecology minister, Ségolène Royal; his special envoy, Laurence Tubiana; and the executive secretary of the United Nations climate convention, Christiana Figueres.
South Africa’s environment minister, Bomo Edna Molewa, called the accord the “first step in a long journey that the global community needs to undertake together.”
At its heart is a breakthrough on an issue that foiled decades of international efforts to address climate change. Previous pacts required developed economies like the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but exempted developing countries such as China and India.
John Kerry, the secretary of state, lauded the climate agreement reached by world leaders in Paris on Saturday as "a victory for all of the planet and for future generations." By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS on Publish Date December 12, 2015. Photo by Francois Mori/Associated Press. Watch in Times Video »
The new accord changes that dynamic, requiring action in some form from every country. But the echoes of the divide persisted during the negotiations.
Delegates received the final draft of the document Saturday afternoon, after a morning when the text was promised but repeatedly delayed. They immediately began parsing it for language that had been the subject of energetic debate, in preparation for a voice vote on whether the deal should become law.
All evening, tense excitement was palpable. The delegates rose to their feet to thank the French team, which drew on the finest elements of the country’s traditions of diplomacy to broker a deal acceptable to all sides.
France’s European partners recalled the coordinated Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, which killed 130 people and threatened to cast a shadow over the negotiations. But, bound by a collective good will toward France, countries redoubled their efforts.
“This demonstrates the strength of the French nation and makes us Europeans all proud of the French nation,” said Miguel Arias Cañete, the European Union’s commissioner for energy and climate action.
Yet amid the spirit of success that dominated the final hours of the talks, Mr. Arias Cañete reminded delegates that the accord was the start of the real work. “Today, we celebrate,” he said. “Tomorrow, we have to act. This is what the world expects of us.”
Representatives of the "high-ambition coalition," including Foreign Minister Tony de Brum of the Marshall Islands, left, wore lapel pins made of dried coconut fronds, a symbol of Mr. de Brum's country. Credit Jacky Naegelen/Reuters
The new deal will not, on its own, solve global warming. At best, scientists who have analyzed it say, it will cut emissions by about half of what is needed to prevent an increase in atmospheric temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. That is the point, scientific studies have concluded, at which the world will be locked into devastating consequences, including rising sea levels, severe droughts and flooding, widespread food and water shortages, and more destructive storms.
But the agreement could be an inflection point in human history: the moment when, because of a huge shift in global economic policy, the inexorable rise in carbon emissions that started during the Industrial Revolution began to level out and eventually decline.
Unlike at the climate summit meeting in Copenhagen in 2009, Mr. Fabius said, the stars for this assembly were aligned.
As negotiators from countries representing a self-described “high-ambition coalition” walked into the plenary session shortly before noon, they were swarmed by cheering bystanders. The coalition, formed to push for ambitious environmental provisions in the deal, includes rich countries such as the United States and members of the European Union; island nations like Tuvalu and Kiribati, which are vulnerable to rising sea levels; and countries with the strongest economies in Latin America, such as Brazil.
Representatives of the group wore lapel pins made of dried coconut fronds, a symbol of the Marshall Islands, whose climate envoy, Tony de Brum, helped form the coalition. Developing countries with the highest emissions, such as China and India, are not members.
Scientists and world leaders had said the talks here were the world’s last, best hope of striking a deal that would begin to avert the most devastating effects of a warming planet.
The final language did not fully satisfy everyone. Representatives of some developing nations expressed consternation. Poorer countries had pushed for a legally binding provision requiring that rich countries appropriate at least $100 billion a year to help them mitigate and adapt to the ravages of climate change. In the deal, that figure appears only in a preamble, not in the legally binding portion.
“We’ve always said that it was important thFat the $100 billion was anchored in the agreement,” said Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, a negotiator for the Democratic Republic of Congo and the incoming leader of the Least Developed Countries coalition. In the end, though, they let it go.
It was not immediately clear what horse trading and arm twisting had brought the negotiators into accord. But in accord they were, after two years of international talks in dozens of world capitals, two weeks of focused negotiations in a temporary tent city here, and two all-night, line-by-line negotiations.
While top energy, environment and foreign policy officials from nearly every country offered positions on the text, ultimately it fell to France, the host, to assemble the final document and see through its approval.
Some countries objected to the speed with which Mr. Fabius banged down the gavel. Nicaragua’s representative, Paul Oquist, said his nation favored a global cap on emissions, a political nonstarter. He said the deal unfairly exempted rich nations from liability for “loss and damage” suffered by those on the front lines of climate change.
The national pledges will not contain warming to 2 degrees Celsius. And more recent scientific reports have concluded that even preventing that amount of warming will not be enough. Vulnerable low-lying island states had pushed for the more stringent target over the objections of major oil producers like Saudi Arabia. But that target is largely considered aspirational and is not legally binding.
The agreement sets a vague goal of having global emissions peak “as soon as possible,” and a schedule for countries to return to the negotiating table every five years with plans for tougher polices. The first such meeting will take place in 2020.
The accord also requires “stocktaking” meetings every five years, at which countries will report how they are reducing their emissions compared with their targets. And it includes language requiring countries to monitor, verify and publicly report their emission levels.
Monitoring and verification had been among the most contentious issues, with negotiators wrangling into Saturday morning. The United States had insisted on an aggressive, uniform system for countries to publicly report their emissions, and on the creation of an outside body to verify reductions. Developing nations like China and India had demanded that they be subject to a less stringent form of monitoring and verification.
The final draft requires all countries to use the same reporting system, but it lets developing nations report fewer details until they are able to better count their emissions.
Some elements of the accord are voluntary, while others are legally binding. That hybrid structure was specifically intended to ensure the support of the United States: An accord with binding targets would be legally interpreted as a new treaty and would have to go before the Senate for ratification. Such a plan would be dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled Senate, where many question the established science of climate change and hope to thwart Mr. Obama’s climate change agenda.
As a result, all language on the reduction of carbon emissions is essentially voluntary. The deal assigns no concrete reduction targets to any country. Instead, each government has crafted a plan to lower emissions at home based on the country’s domestic politics and economy.
The accord uses the language of an existing treaty, the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, to require countries to verify their emissions and to periodically put forth tougher domestic plans.
“This agreement is highly unlikely to trigger any legitimate grounds for compelling Senate ratification,” said Paul Bledsoe, a climate change official in the Bill Clinton administration. “The language itself is sufficiently vague regarding emissions pledges, and presidents in any event have frequently used their broad authority to enter into these sorts of executive agreements.”
