As COP25 negotiations stall in Madrid, the United States is being called out for its role in thwarting negotiations to finalize the Paris Rulebook.
“The overall assessment is, this is not a good situation,” Seyni Nafo, the former chair of the African Group of Negotiators on climate change, told reporters on Friday. “Not having a decision on some of those issues might be better than having a bad decision.”
One big hurdle is the set of rules around creating an international carbon market under Article 6 of the Paris agreement. Most countries agreed on the guidelines, and negotiators have been reluctant to name the holdouts. But on Friday, Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, Costa Rica’s minister for energy and environment, called out the United States, Brazil, and Australia as the parties thwarting closure on the issue. Vox
Climate activists are lashing out at the powerful polluting nations for their attempts to stymie the meager progress on the Paris Agreement. Negotiations, after all, remain committed to a 2degree C increase in global temperature, while experts are now leery that even a 1.5 degree C commitment is aggressive enough to adequately stave off the worst case scenarios.
"Just as we thought the slow pace and weak ambition shown at the climate talks couldn't get worse, along comes COP 25," said Sara Shaw, Climate Justice and Energy Program coordinator for Friends of the Earth International (FOEI). She also criticized "the advance of dodgy carbon trading that will only exacerbate the climate crisis and harm Southern communities."
Greenpeace International co executive director Jennifer Morgan referred to climate politics as “quite dark. You have the oil majors working with the Trump administration, with others, to try and slow things down here. And you have others that just aren't prioritizing it." That means "the role of countries or units like the European Union becomes even more important, but... it's like they're tired and they're not rising above the daily kind of issues and there's no time for that."
A group of large developing economies—China, Brazil, India, and South Africa—are pushing back on efforts to write the rulebook for international carbon trading regimes. That's a major priority for the meeting, and the nearly 200 countries attending the talks need to get that out of the way if they're going to move on to the next big task: preparing their new domestic climate targets for 2020's meeting in Glasgow. A failure to get a set of rules on trading in place is threatening to push back that effort to raise the world's climate "ambition"—and could undermine the entire Paris agreement. Politico Morning Energy
As the US moves closer to its November, 2020 departure from the Paris Agreement, it will continue as part of the UNFCCC and BuzzFeed reports today that the country hopes to hold a seat on the panel dealing with how poorer nations are compensated for loss and damage caused by developed nation’s carbon use. From The US Is Once Again The Villain At The UN Climate Summit:
The US is allegedly trying to blow up one of the top priorities the world’s poorest nations are working to achieve at the meeting: a mechanism for developing nations hurt by climate change to seek compensation from the wealthy nations that emitted the largest share of greenhouse gasses.
“The US is using its last chance to cover its ass,” said Taylor Billings, press secretary for Corporate Accountability, an NGO that organizes against corporations threatening health and the environment. “The US is seeking to protect itself, other polluting countries, and potentially even the corporations based there, from having to pay for the loss and damage they have caused.”
NYT columnist Paul Krugman’s pens a sobering OpEd The Party that Ruined the Planet detailing how some 20 years of Republican climate denial is in large part responsible for the world’s failing to adequately and rapidly respond to the climate crisis.
Long before Republicans began attributing every negative development to the machinations of the “deep state,” they were insisting that global warming was a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a vast global cabal of corrupt scientists.
And long before Trump began weaponizing the power of the presidency for political gain, Republicans were using their political power to harass climate scientists and, where possible, criminalize the practice of science itself.
While Krugman notes that money is a huge part of the problem (“In the current cycle Republicans have received 97 percent of political contributions from the coal industry, 88 percent from oil and gas. And this doesn’t even count the wing nut welfare offered by institutions supported by the Koch brothers and other fossil-fuel moguls.”) he suggests that Republicans are stymied by what he calls the “Halo Effect,” the concept that enacting policies to protect the environment opens the door to other progressive policies, like healthcare or childcare.
Why, after all, has the world failed to take action on climate, and why is it still failing to act even as the danger gets ever more obvious? There are, of course, many culprits; action was never going to be easy.
But one factor stands out above all others: the fanatical opposition of America’s Republicans, who are the world’s only major climate-denialist party. Because of this opposition, the United States hasn’t just failed to provide the kind of leadership that would have been essential to global action, it has become a force against action.
It was the US, after all, which held up the signing of the Paris Agreement as Secretary of State John Kerry demanded the wordage be changed from “shall to should” so Congress would be more amenable. The US was among the powerful polluters demanding the agreement not be legally binding.