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.”
An historic global deal to limit and tackle climate change is a step closer after a final draft agreement has been completed at the United Nations conference in Paris.
After nearly a fortnight of negotiations, and several days in which exhausted country representatives including Foreign Minister Julie Bishop had thrashed out details through the day and night, French and UN officials have completed an edit to present to ministers Saturday night Australian time.
Climate activists carry a red banner during a demonstration at the COP21, United Nations Climate Change Conference, in Le Bourget, north of Paris, Friday, Dec. 11, 2015. Hundreds of climate activists have stretched a block-long red banner through the Paris climate talks to symbolize "the red lines" that they don't want negotiators to cross in trying to reach an international accord to fight global warming. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
"We have a text to present," an official in the office of Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said, according to news agency Agence France-Presse.
The text was being translated into the six languages of the UN before being distributed, and then debated at a special session on Saturday - beyond the original Friday deadline for the talks.
That text will be released at 11.30am local time (9.30pm AEDT) according to Miguel Arias Canete, the European Union's climate commissioner:
US Secretary of State John Kerry speaks to reporters following a meeting with France's Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius. Photo: Mandel Ngan
Earlier, Australia had joined a loose collection of wealthy and developing nationsthat were pushing for a strengthened global deal to tackle climate change.
If successful, the climate deal would be the first to include action from all countries. Nearly 200 countries have been negotiating towards an agreement.
Slogans were projected on the Eiffel Tower as the climate conference in Paris pushed into overtime.
As is often the case in United Nations climate negotiations, the final hours have boiled down to high-stakes brinkmanship between competing groups, particularly the industrialised world and major emerging economies including China and India.
Ms Bishop, who has been at the second week of the talks, said Australia had received a formal invitation to join the so-called "high ambition coalition" from the European Union, and had accepted.
The talks were supposed to finish at 6pm Friday but missed the deadline.
The group also includes the US, Canada and dozens of African and small island states. The coalition's chairman, Marshall Islands Foreign Minister Tony de Brum, said: "We are delighted to learn of Australia's interest and look forward to hearing what more they may be able to do to join our coalition of high ambition here in Paris."
"Everyone is welcome to join. Bring your credentials with you," Mr de Brum said.
The coalition featured prominently on Friday. Ministers from member countries held a press conference to announce that Brazil, a strategically important country because of its size and status as a developing nation, had joined. Other countries named as new members included the Philippines, Switzerland and the Seychelles.
The slogan "DECARBONIZE" is projected on the Eiffel Tower as part of the COP21, United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, France, Friday, Dec. 11, 2015. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)
Australia was not mentioned at the press conference, but Ms Bishop said: "I've talked to Tony de Brum, we've talked about it. We are part of this coalition.
"But it is not a negotiating coalition, it is just people signing up and saying 'we want to see an ambitious agreement'."
The coalition is seen as an attempt to push back against heavy hitting developing countries such as China, India and Saudi Arabia. Some negotiators accused those countries of launching a last minute, coordinated attack to try to reduce the scope of a deal.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and her Marshall Islands counterpart Tony de Brum meet at the Paris climate talks. Photo: Andrew McLeish
Ms Bishop and other government ministers worked through the night until 6am, but little progress was made, and by the morning Mr Fabius was conceeding the talks would have to run into Saturday.
One negotiator said oil-rich Saudi Arabia was playing a destructive role and challenging many parts of an ambitious draft text released by the French organisers on Thursday.
China and India also challenged aspectsof the draft, including how, and how often, emissions targets would be reviewed.
Developed nations tried to harden the language on who should contribute to climate financing for poorer nations. A group of non-European industrialised countries called the umbrella group, which includes Australia, have been trying to expand the donor base to try include China, India and other advanced emerging countries.
Ms Bishop said: "We want to have an agreement that reflects the contemporary reality of the world today and beyond, and so we believe there should be room in the agreement text relating to financing that those countries who are able to contribute [do] contribute."
Nozipho Mxakato-Diseko, South African ambassador and the chairwoman of a group of developing countries called the G-77 plus China, said financing was the key to the whole deal. She said the umbrella group was holding the talks hostage by not moving.
"If this should fail it won't be the fault of the French, it will be the fault of the umbrella group," she said.
Indian Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar accused the developed world of not showing flexibility.
"It's about differentiation [between developed and developing world], equity, and climate justice," he said.
In Washington, US President Barrack Obama called his Chinese counterpart Xi Jiping to discuss the talks. The White House said both leaders gave a commitment that their negotiating teams in Paris would continue to work "closely together and with others to realise the vision of an ambitious climate agreement".
Speaking to reporters, Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Lui Jianmin defended his country's position on key sticking points, such as industrialised nations' insistence that there be a more common approach to reporting and reviewing emissions targets.
Mr Lui said this was a view held widely among developing counties, not just China.
"Our capacity and national conditions means still we shall have some difficulties... so the process needs to be more about encouragement. We need to avoid any punitive or intrusive measures," he said.
Mr Liu taunted the "high ambition coalition", describing it as a performance, saying it had only a dozen members. Coalition organisers said over 100 countries had signed up.
Australia had initially been caught unaware by the emergence of the high ambition grouping, but was expressing support behind the scenes for its aims later in the week before signing up on Friday.
The decision to join follows Mr de Brum taking issue with a joke made by Ms Bishop about the impact of climate change on islands in his nation. But that appeared to have been dealt with at a side meeting in Paris during the week, when Ms Bishop and Mr de Brum shared a hug.
A Greenpeace investigation uncovers a complex climate science denial machine involving cash from big business in exchange for "peer review" studies.
(Image via @AnneSpaceCoast.)
AN UNDERCOVER INVESTIGATION by environment group Greenpeace has found some of the world's most vocal climate science denial groups were willing to accept cash from fossil fuel interests in return for writing articles and reports that reject the impacts of greenhouses gases.
Greenpeace operatives posing as representatives of coal and oil companies were told that while the reports could be produced, there were ways that the sources of funding could be hidden.
Academics affiliated with leading U.S. academic institutions Princeton and Penn State universities are implicated in the Greenpeace research.
According to a report on the investigation at Greenpeace's EnergyDesk website, Princeton's Professor William Happer had revealed he had accepted cash from coal company Peabody Energy in return for providing testimony to U.S. congress but had routed the cash through a climate denial group. Happer also offered his services but said that a new climate science denial group, CO2 Coalition, should be used to channel the funds.
Groups including the Global Warming Policy Foundation and Donors Trust are also alleged to have been complicit in providing "peer review" services for fossil fuel clients and, in the case of Donors Trust, in providing an untraceable route for the fossil fuel payments.
The story comes as Happer is preparing to give evidence to a congressional hearing of the Senate Subcomittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness, chaired by Republican and presidential hopeful Ted Cruz. That hearing, scheduled for Tuesday, 8 December, also calls fellow "sceptics" Dr John Christy, of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Dr Judith Curry of Georgia Institute of Technology and conservative commentator Mark Steyn.
A DeSmogBlog investigation into Donors Trust and its partner group Donors Capital Fund found that between 2005 and 2012, some $479 million of income to the two groups was untraceable. Of the amounts that were traceable, DeSmog found that $7.65 million had come from the Knowledge and Progress Fund (KPF).
On the KPF board are oil billionaire and major Republican benefactor Charles Koch, his wife Liz and son Charles Chase Koch. Richard Fink, a Koch company director and long-standing aide to Charles Koch, is also a KPF director.
The Greenpeace investigation raises questions about the use of the Donors funds in financing climate science denial groups. Donors Trust, together with oil giant ExxonMobil, have also funded the work of Harvard-Smithsonian affiliated researcher Dr Willie Soon, who claims carbon dioxide cannot change the climate.
Greenpeace also claims that CO2 Coalition board member William O'Keefe, a former Exxon lobbyist, had suggested in an email to Happer that Donors Trust be used as a route to conceal cash from a fictional Middle eastern oil and gas company.
The investigation also targeted Happer's work with the London-based contrarian group the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), founded by former UK chancellor Lord Nigel Lawson. Greenpeace wrote:
'Professor Happer, who sits on the GWPF's Academic Advisory Council, was asked by undercover reporters if he could put the industry funded report through the same peer review process as previous GWPF reports they claimed to have been "thoroughly peer reviewed" '.
Happer explained that this process had consisted of members of the Advisory Council and other selected scientists reviewing the work, rather than presenting it to an academic journal.
He added:
I would be glad to ask for a similar review for the first drafts of anything I write for your client. Unless we decide to submit the piece to a regular journal, with all the complications of delay, possibly quixotic editors and reviewers that is the best we can do, and I think it would be fine to call it a peer review.
Asked for comment by Greenpeace, GWPF said in a statement that it rejected Greenpeace's investigation, saying any claims it had offered to put a fossil fuel commission report through its own version of peer review were a "fabrication".
From a 1.5C or 2C limit, to climate aid and the public reporting of emissions, here are the main differences in the draft text
The COP21 conference is currently revising the draft text for a global deal on cutting emissions. Photograph: IISD
Negotiators at the UN climate talks in Paris are now nearing the end of a fortnight of searching for a global deal on climate change. The mood is upbeat but there are still significant disagreements over some key issues. They came out in the publication on Wednesday of the draft negotiating text.
These are the six key road blocks that negotiators will have to move or get around if a deal is to be done:
Temperature goal - 1.5C or 2C
The disagreement here is over what temperature rise (with a baseline of pre-industrial times) the politicians set as the goal for the world to stick to. Even fractions of a degree could make big differences in terms of the impacts from sea level rise and extreme weather the world is likely to see.
Small islands and low-lying states are at risk of disappearing under rising seas even at the currently agreed 2C temperature goal, and have long argued for tougher limits on warming. Last June, a group of more than 40 countries adopted the slogan "1.5 to stay alive". They now have the support of more than 80 countries, including the US, Canada and Europe, who call themselves the "high ambition coalition". But is 1.5C even possible given warming to date and that already built into the system? "The maths is simple," according to Myles Allen, a climate scientist at Oxford. "Human-induced warming is already close to 1C, so to limit warming to 2C, CO2 emissions need to fall, on average, by 10% of today's emission rate for every tenth of a degree of warming from now on. To limit warming to 1.5C, CO2 emissions need to fall, on average, by 20% for every tenth of a degree of warming. At the rate we're warming at the moment, a tenth of a degree means five to 10 years. So 1.5 will be tough."
That presents a serious problem for a diplomatic process that must be rooted in the science. Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton University climate scientist and a longtime observer of the international climate negotiations, suggested 1.5C could remain as an aspirational goal, alongside 2C – but it would be problematic if it were the only goal. "If you put it as an agreed goal you would probably have a large fraction of the expert community saying you can't do this and it's very unlikely. The net effect of that is that it would undermine the credibility of the process because people would get the impression, rightly so, that diplomats are agreeing to things that are totally unrealistic just for the sake of producing an outcome and getting out of the room." The draft released by the French hosts on Wednesday has three options: 1. below 2C, 2. well below 2C with efforts to reach 1.5C and 3. 1.5C.
A schoolgirl tries to collect water from a dry puddle in Nongoma, north-west of Durban, that has been badly affected by the recent drought. Photograph: Mujahid Safodien/AFP/Getty Images
Zero emissions
Getting to 1.5C or 2C requires achieving near zero greenhouse gas emissions by the second half of this century. Business leaders, some campaign groups and even the Pope have called on negotiators to adopt a decarbonisation goal as a way of translating temperature goals into more tangible targets for action. How and when are the big questions, and language is critical. Net zero means emissions can continue but must be balanced by negative emissions efforts such as tree planting or technologies to suck emission from the air. The draft released on Wednesday has two main options. Under option 1, the stronger option, countries aim to peak global greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, with rich countries making deep emissions cuts by 2050 with an end goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions. Even here, there are divisions on the scale of cuts and the date for reaching net-zero, mid-century or end century. Under option 2, countries would commit only to a vague goal of reaching climate neutrality over the course of the century, with no specific targets or dates.
Smoke billows from a coal-fired generator at a steel factory in Hebei, China. The Chinese government has set 2030 as a deadline to reach its peak emissions. Photograph: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Money
Finance was the big issue leading into these negotiations. Developing countries need funding to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, and build the infrastructure that will help protect their people from extreme weather and other climate impacts. Best estimates suggest it will cost trillions to transform the global economy. Rich countries committed to rounding up $100bn a year from private and public sources by 2020. Best estimates suggest the pot is currently only two-thirds full – and rising economies such as India and Brazil say the accounting is murky. Developing countries are demanding stronger guarantees rich countries will deliver on their pledges in 2020 and beyond – and that there will be more funds available to deal with the climate impacts they are already experiencing. To date, only about a quarter of climate funding has been directed towards dealing with those impacts, and countries say that is not a big enough fraction. The US doubled its climate aid to $860m on Wednesday. Developing countries will be looking to other developed countries to do more.
Loss and damage
Some low-lying and vulnerable countries are facing irreversible and permanent damage from climate change. Land loss could force millions to relocate. Those countries want the agreement to recognise those dangers, and offer some measure of protection. But the US is adamantly opposed to any language in the agreement about liability or compensation that could potentially expose US companies to the threat of law suits for causing climate change. "Loss and damage as an idea is meant to refer to the impacts of climate change that neither mitigation nor adaptation has been able to address and in so far as there is a focus on that kind of element, that is completely appropriate," Todd Stern, the state department climate change envoy, said. "We don't accept the idea of compensation and liability. We have never accepted and we are not going to accept it now."
The choices before negotiators in the draft released on Wednesday range from burying any reference to loss and damage in a separate section of the text to setting up an entirely separate process to look at the problems of land loss and climate refugees.
A man carries his baby along a seawall in an area lying more than a meter below sea level in the Maura Baru district in Jakarta, Indonesia. Jakarta, southeast Asia’s largest city is sinking slowly into the sea. Photograph: Ed Wray/Getty Images
Future improvements to the deal
Governments at the Paris meeting have come out with lofty ambitions, unlike other climate talks, and there is a sense of momentum towards an agreement. But what about the follow-through? Industrial countries in particular are pushing hard for public reporting of all countries emissions reductions, a so-called "stocktaking", which would subject climate laggards to public shaming. The US and other countries are pushing for an early stocktaking in 2018. Developing countries are trying to push back the first inventory to 2024. Then there is "ratcheting". Developed countries are pushing for governments to put forward tougher emissions plans at five-year intervals, in order to take advantage of advances in clean energy technology, and improve the chances of getting to zero emissions in the middle of the century. India and other developing countries want to put off those ratchet meetings to once a decade or so.
Wind turbines shrouded in fog near Petersberg mountain, Germany. The Petersberg hill, north of Halle/Saale, is the highest point in the Saale region, at 250.4 metres above sea level. Photograph: Jens Wolf/EP
Developed v developing world
This is the biggest stumbling block because the question about differentiation is rooted in history, unlike other areas of talks which are about actions in the future. Who should bear responsibility for climate change – the countries that industrialised first and were responsible for historic emissions, or developing countries such as China, now the world's biggest emitter? The bigger developing countries argue they did little or nothing to cause climate change but are being asked to trim their growth to reduce emissions. The US insists that the current structure of the agreement, which relies on voluntary pledges put forward by each country, acknowledges those differences in economic history. "This is all about differentiation," John Kerry, the secretary of state, said. India which has played a strong leadership role in the developing country bloc in the Paris negotiations, said the new structure represents progress, but that rich countries should not be trying to re-write history. "Today the world is experiencing and many countries are suffering because of a temperature rise of 0.8C and that temperature rise has taken place because of historic emissions of 150 years so that can not be wished away," Prakash Javadekar, India's environment minister, said. "Historic emissions are responsible."
Climate summit: 'this is doable'. Amid protests in Paris, UN's Ban Ki-Moon says he is optimistic there will be a strong deal at the Climate summit as deadline looms.
Work on an historic climate deal that for the first time would require all countries to play a role in curbing greenhouse gas emissions will continue through the weekend after organisers conceded the summit would not meet its Friday night deadline.
Climate change negotiators from nearly 200 countries had worked through the night Australian time as they tried to secure an agreement. Some had not slept for 48 hours.
French Foreign Affairs Minister Laurent Fabius arrives to talk to the media. The French have released a draft text of a climate deal.
The French hosts of the Paris climate change summit had launched an ambitious move on Thursday to accelerate the talks towards a final agreement, releasing a new draft version of a global deal that aimed to force through resolutions to major disputes.
Speaking before heading into all night meetings, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said the negotiations remained in a delicate position, and there was still a lot of work to do.
"I think that the text is about 80 per cent there," Ms Bishop said.
Participants at the climate conference. Photo: AP
"There are still a number of options that could go either way. But this is more positive than some were expecting."
The latest draft text is relatively free of brackets, which are used to reflect areas of dispute. The previous version of the agreement had 361. It is now down to 50, with 13 options remaining.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said it was time for countries to show the "necessary responsibility" to find common ground.. "I think, dear friends, that we will make it," he said.
US Secretary of State John Kerry (right), with White House senior advisor Brian Deese (left) and US Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern (centre).
The biggest outstanding issues are how emissions are monitored and tracked in different countries, funding for poorer nations to adapt and cut greenhouse gas pollution, and whether the rich will pay the vulnerable to help them recover from irreparable damage caused by climate change.
But the text does propose compromises on how often emissions targets should be reviewed and the long-term goals of the agreement.
It includes a reference to keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees, which had been pushed hard by the countries most affected by climate change – particularly, low-lying island states. It sits in the text alongside the more commonly recognised goal of below two degrees.
A poster demanding that warming be limited to 1.5 degrees, held up during a protest by activists at the Paris climate talks. Photo: AP
Marshall Islands Foreign Minister Tony de Brum welcomed the inclusion of the 1.5 degrees target. "With this, I would be able to go home and tell my people that our chance for survival is not lost," he said.
Ms Bishop on Thursday night chaired a meeting of a group of non-European industrialised nations called the Umbrella Group, including the US, Canada and Japan. She said the bloc wanted to secure an agreement that was ambitious, ensured proper transparency and five-yearly reviews of emissions targets.
She said there were still outstanding issues, in particular climate funding for poorer nations and how the difference between developed and developing countries was reflected in the agreement.
Climate Institute deputy chief executive Erwin Jackson said the world was on the cusp of getting the best possible outcome from Paris. He said the biggest political issues still need to be resolved including transparency, finance and loss and damage.
"Things could still go awry," Mr Jackson said.
From Wednesday afternoon, ministers and negotiators had worked through night and day hunting for compromise.
Less formal meetings were carried out in a "indaba" format – a Zulu-style meeting where all present get a turn to speak.
Mr Fabius described the meetings as the "indaba of solutions".
The summit was due to close at 6pm on Friday in Paris, but news agency Agence France-Presse quoted an official saying a final draft of the text would not be released until Saturday local time.
Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna tweeted after attending all-night meetings: "It's a wrap. Negotiations continue tomorrow (aka today). Final text expected Saturday morning."
An initial draft of the text was generally considered to be less ambitious than hoped, but the second version released late on Thursday night had been strengthened. Some countries that had signalled wariness about stronger goals, including India, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia, were expected to object to parts of it.
A senior African delegate described the second draft as "a pretty good attempt". Another African delegate said there key things still to be sorted out, but "there are a lot of elements which are great".
Nathaniel Keohane, a campaigner with the US Environmental Defence Fund, said there had been "striking progress" towards a consensus in the past week, particularly on establishing the long-term goal. He said key divisions remained on the relative roles of developed and developing nations.
The issue of how to set-up a review system that could lead to countries making stronger commitments over time also appeared to have been resolved, with an initial stocktake of how global emissions are tracking in 2019, leading to the first reviews of targets in 2020. Parties would review their targets every five years.
"It's a bet that when we come around in 2019, technology will have changed enough that you'll have pressure for more ambition," Me Keohane said.
The Turnbull government's pledge is for a 26-28 per cent reduction in Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared with 2005 levels. The government plans to review the target in 2017.
In the absence of an enforceable set of commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, concerned citizens may want to supplement international agreements on climate change. We suggest that litigation could have an important role to play.
Many avenues exist for bringing behaviour that drives climate change before the courts. Options include the exploration of fiduciary duties of company officers and directors, as well as those of pension fund trustees. Cases that seek to block state aid to carbon-intensive projects and cases to reform energy markets are also anticipated. The holy grail of climate-related litigation, however, is a determination of liability that some entity, such as an energy corporation or a coal power plant, is responsible to a claimant for climate change damage.
This theory of action falls into the area of tort law, which is concerned with providing remedies for provable harms. Success in such an action revolves around proving causality between someone's actions or negligence and a given damage. These cases will therefore depend in large part on the science that demonstrates this causality. We argue that, if science and the law join forces, there is a good chance of achieving court orders for the restriction of greenhouse gas emissions in the not-too-distant future.
Two aspects of causation
A claimant in such a case of damage from climate change will have to convince the court of two distinct aspects of causation.
First, the court will have to accept that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions cause climate change. Here, a 2015 case from the Netherlands is very helpful. In the Urgenda case the court made a detailed examination of the science, by reviewing the reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and determined that it had to accept the IPCC conclusions as fact. The court then found that the Dutch government has a duty of care to its citizens to minimize the risk of climate change, and accordingly ordered the government to write a plan to reduce the country's greenhouse gas emissions beyond the government's current commitment to do so. The government has appealed the decision. As far as we are aware, this is the first time that a court has declared anthropogenic climate change to be beyond dispute.
The second aspect of causation that the court will have to accept is more complicated to prove. The claimant needs to convince the court that anthropogenic emissions are the cause of the particular climate event that the claimant alleges to have caused a specific harm.
To understand the challenges of winning such a case, consider two hypothetical cases that are simple to claim but difficult to prove. In the first case, a woman claims that her mother's death was caused by an extreme heatwave in Australia, which in turn was caused by climate change. In the second case, a man claims property damage from a storm surge along the coast of Devon.
Assume we can get past the first causation hurdle: that an English or Australian court would agree with the Urgenda ruling that anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere cause, or at least contribute to, climate change.
Then we have to identify a defendant. Say it is a coal burning utility. Its emissions, according to our assumption above, contribute to climate change. Under tort law, the crucial question then is whether the utility has a duty of care to the claimant. This duty of care depends on what a reasonable person would have thought in the position of the defendant. We would need to decide at what point in time the knowledge that they were contributing to climate change and its damages should be imputed to the utility. Assume that we can convince the court that 2007, the date of the first IPCC report that found a 90%-or-higher confidence level for human-induced warming, is the point in time at which a reasonable person should have known.
The second aspect of causation evaluates whether this defendant caused this harm to this claimant. In the case of climate change, a defendant or group of defendants contributed to the harm in a way that can potentially be quantified with reasonable certainty; however, they were not the only contributors.
Epidemiology analogues
To have a clear example of how a court might approach this issue, let us look at the English courts. We will examine the closest useful parallel to climate change provided by the jurisprudence of this court system: how epidemiological evidence has been used in health cases. In these cases there is a clear harm, but difficulty in showing that the harm was caused by a specific defendant.
Let us start with a relatively simple case from the point of view of damage attribution. In XYZ versus Schering Health Care, the claimants argued that oral contraceptives that they had been prescribed caused them to suffer from deep vein thrombosis. The trial court considered extensive epidemiological evidence. Though it was troubled by the conflicts in the testimony, the court came to a numerical conclusion on risk. It decided that the contraceptives in question increased the risk by 1.7 times. The court determined that this was not enough for the claimants to win. An increase in risk of at least two times would, however, have been enough.
Simply stated, the English courts appear comfortable holding a defendant liable in health cases if the defendant's products or actions have more than doubled the risk of a medical condition.
A more complicated case, with multiple potential defendants whose individual contributions are uncertain, involves asbestos. Malignant mesothelioma is caused by asbestos fibres. In Fairchild versus Glenhaven Funeral Services Ltd, the House of Lords carved out an exception to the 'risk-doubling' rule. Malignant mesothelioma is not dose-related, and may be caused by a single fibre of asbestos lodging in the lung. A claimant may have worked for multiple companies who exposed him but will never be able to prove where he inhaled the deadly fibre. The Court therefore decided to hold the employers joint and severally liable and allow apportionment of the damages among them.
In a more recent UK Supreme Court case, Lord Mance's observations on epidemiological evidence indicate a generally cautious approach: “That epidemiological evidence used with proper caution, can be admissible and relevant in conjunction with specific evidence related to the individual circumstances and parties is, however, common ground and clearly right... Whether, and if so when, epidemiological evidence can by itself prove a case is a question best considered not in the abstract but in a particular case, when and if that question arises. If it can, I would hope and expect that this would only occur in the rarest of cases.”
In the latest Supreme Court case looking at epidemiological evidence, the Court decided not to extend the Fairchild exception to the risk-doubling rule beyond mesothelioma cases. In Ministry of Defence versus AB and others, the Court reviewed claims by men who had served in the British Armed Forces, and who argued that exposure to fallout from nuclear testing had increased the risk of illnesses they suffered. The claimants argued that the radiation materially increased the risk of their diseases, but the Court declined to extend the Fairchild exemption to their medical conditions.
The case for climate litigation
With those waymarks of the English courts' views on statistical evidence to guide us, let us look at what the science of climate attribution can say about causation.
Storm surges and heatwaves are the events that the science is most comfortable in attributing to anthropogenic change. The interesting point from the forensic perspective is how surprisingly the odds have shifted in recent years.
For example, the record-breaking seasonal temperatures seen during the 2003 and 2012 heatwaves in Europe would have been at least a 1 in 1,000 years event in background climate conditions without anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, but are now about a 1 in 5 years event. However, is this huge statistical shift enough to convince a court?
In the heatwave case, the risk of the event that gives rise to the harm far more than doubled, an increase in risk that the court was comfortable with in the contraceptives case. However, in the latter there was a single defendant responsible for the harm. Even though the total probability for a heatwave has much more than doubled with climate change, it is a large group of actors who are responsible. None of them individually has come close to doubling the risk.
The multiple contributors to the increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and their consequent damage makes the heatwave case somewhat more comparable to the mesothelioma case where the claimant has multiple employers who may all have contributed to the harm. They were all liable.
But assume climate scientists were able to say that a given event was almost certainly caused by anthropogenic causes, as argued by James Hansen and others. With something like certainty as to cause, the court then only has to apportion what it sees as actual liability, not decide whether a defendant has made a sufficient contribution to an increased odds of harm.
Say you could show that Exxon Mobile is responsible for 3.2% of total anthropogenic climate change2. In either of our two example cases, the heatwave death or storm surge property damage, should the court simply apportion 3.2% of the damages to Exxon Mobile?
This solution has the appeal of simplicity. Exxon could counter that it would be unfair to make it pay damages without a similar calculation and percentage contribution from all other emitters. This theory would require a calculation of the contribution by, for example, every person driving a car, and would quickly make the case unworkable. Whether or not Exxon would succeed with this tactic would depend on the court's rules about co-defendants and its willingness to bring them in.
Even assuming Exxon lost that argument, it is not straightforward to determine what remedy rightly follows.
At the Adjudicating the Future symposium in London, supreme court judges and scholars from around the world discussed this issue of remedy. The notion emerged that even if everything lines up, courts may be reluctant to penalize Exxon, or other key carbon emitters, with monetary outlay for existing climate damages. Not because they are not liable but because the liability could become extremely large. Here Exxon's argument would be that if it were liable for 3.2% of the damage in a single heatwave or storm surge to one claimant, it will be similarly liable to all future claimants for all climate damages. With total damages from climate change that could reach somewhere between 2% and 20% of GDP per annum, even Exxon's deep pockets would feel the pinch. Jurists at the conference felt, however, that a reasonable approach would be to ask for a future-facing, not backward-looking, remedy.
Returning to our hypothetical Australian heatwave case, this could look as follows. Assume that a court agreed that the damage was caused by anthropogenic climate change, and the defendant, a coal-burning electricity producer in Australia, was — among other parties — liable for contributing to the harm. The claimant then follows the strategy the jurists were comfortable with, and does not ask for monetary damages. Instead, in a public-spirited and forward-looking manner, the relief requested is for the utility to restrict their greenhouse gas emissions by some large margin, driving future climate benefits. The interesting question is then whether a court would grant this relief.
Courts are in business to provide relief for proven harms, and tort law is the programme that delivers these results. It is hard to imagine that courts will fail to provide any relief for damages caused by climate change. The challenge will lie in presenting a harm that appeals to the sensibility of the court, causally connecting it via compelling science to the conduct of one or more defendants who could have done things differently once the dangers of climate change were known, and asking for a remedy that seems reasonable.
What can scientists do?
Keep developing credible and robust climate attribution science; see how you might be able to confidently argue that a particular event was (almost certainly) caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases; and be prepared to testify as an expert witness in a case.
