The Guardian has been trying hard to achieve the impossible task of keeping up with what’s happening in Paris at the climate talks. But the upshot is some people are giving a tentative thumbs-up to the probable contents of the agreement that comes out of the negotiations. Some remain in the wait-and-see-with-trepidation stage. Some think nothing but window dressing will be agreed to. Not really different than when the talks started two weeks ago.
Negotiations on the final text will reach beyond Friday’s deadline into Saturday morning, we’ve been told. Not unexpected. Nor would be an extension into Sunday morning. Here’s what The Guardian’s John Vidal summarizes as the hold-up in getting an agreement finalized Friday as originally scheduled:
The key sticking points to a deal are: the level of ambition, financing for poorer countries to cope with climate change, transparency over how countries carbon cuts are tracked (referred to as transparency), and language around the differing responsibilities and capabilities of developed and developing countries for tackling emissions.
It appears that one of the most controversial issues of the talks—dealing with loss and damage to the most vulnerable states from climate change—will get soft but prominent attention in the pact.
Coral Davenport at The New York Times takes the view that the test of the worthiness of the document will be whether it signals to investors that they should bail out of fossil fuels and shift to low-carbon sources of energy.
Few if any activists in the global climate movement believe the final document will go as far as we need to go as fast as we need to go. That’s especially the case given what Jonathan Katz laid out in his The New Republic piece Thursday—As a climate deal nears, power players want accountability (just not for themselves):
I’ve actually seen what it looks like when rich countries “give”—or more accurately, promise to give—to people in the developing world. It’s ugly.
The truth is that powerful countries rarely simply hand money to foreign governments or people. Instead, we pay ourselves to do projects, then evaluate them ourselves, with little meaningful participation from the people we nominally try to help. Oxfam has said that 85 percent of the U.S. “foreign aid” budget actually goes toU.S. government contractors and U.S.-based nongovernmental organizations—despite the fact that study after study shows it’s more effective to support other governments’ budgets or better yet (surprise!) just give people money.
Same old, same old. Sigh. But we can still hope the document that emerges in a few days will be good enough as a foundation for later amendments that will accelerate the time-frame for making the needed adjustments to civilization’s output of greenhouse gases. On the fruition of that hope depends our success at avoiding the worst impacts of climate change.
Maybe come Monday morning, the world will actually have a serious agreement, imperfect but at least not some barely tweaked version of business-as-usual, a firm commitment to radically change how we humans do things based on recognition that every lost minute now exacerbates the severe impacts already in the pipeline and guarantees that other impacts will occur. In other words, an agreement that stops pretending.
If, however, we are greeted Monday by a bouncy television ad from Exxon slickly explaining to us rabble that the Paris Pact is a great agreement and the company, which paid hundreds of millions of dollars to create and amplify lies about climate change, is now in the forefront of curbing emissions because it is a great environmental steward … if we see an ad like that we’ll know we’re screwed.
There are some people who, for sure, think the talks—COP 21—will be no better than they were the past 20 times. Tex Dworkin takes note of Shannon Biggs and Tom B.K. Goldtooth report, the Rights of Nature & Mother Earth: Sowing Seeds of Resistance, Love and Change. It’s the product of the grassroots organizations Movement Rights, the Indigenous Environmental Network and Global Exchange. The report predicts: “While billed as the most important climate meeting ever held, the next generation will not look back on the Paris COP 21 as the historic moment governments took decisive action on climate change.” The problem is that the negotiators have all along failed to take nature fully into account in their efforts.
The Guardian early Friday morning pointed to a mixed bag of views about prospects. Here are three:
Lord Stern, the leading economist who produced an eponymous report on the cost of climate change for the British government, said this morning that “good progress” had been on the “promising” draft text.
He added:
The atmosphere between the parties has been the best that I have seen in the last ten years of COPs [Conference of the Parties, the name of the major annual UN climate summit]. That’s founded on the recognition of the magnitude of the risks, and recognition of how we combine poverty reduction, development and climate responsibility: that’s been a key element in the spirit we’ve seen here. [...]
Tony de Brum, foreign minister of the Marshall Islands:
This text is a good attempt to work through some of the options toward finding landing zones. It forces countries to fight for what they really need to see in the final agreement. There is a clear recognition that the world must work towards limiting warming to below 1.5C, and that it would be much safer to do so. With this, I would be able to go home and tell my people that our chance for survival is not lost. [...]
Lucy Cadena, Friends of the Earth International climate justice and energy coordinator:
The pillars of a just agreement - ambition and equity - have been completely undermined. After all the warm words of developed countries on a 1.5C limit, the new text contains no obligation to stay under this threshold. Shockingly, the text could allow for carbon emissions to continue until 2099.
Cadena is referring to the long term goal on cutting emissions—the latest version of the text plumps for the woolliest language on that (more detail on that here).