[Southern California Permaculture] The Paris Project: Day 4 New Draft Climate Agreement Released

Sat Dec 5 10:14:19 PST 2015

Hi all, Ethan Stewart of the SB Independent 
continuing to do an excellent job covering the 
Climate Talks in Paris.  Other days available on 
their website: http://www.independent.com/news/2015/dec/04/paris-project-day-4/

The Paris Project: Day 4

New Draft Climate Agreement Released Amid Mixed Bag of Progress and Outrage

----------

Friday, December 4, 2015

by 
<http://www.independent.com/staff/ethan-stewart/>ETHAN 
<http://www.independent.com/staff/ethan-stewart/>STEWART 
(<http://www.independent.com/staff/ethan-stewart/contact/>CONTACT)

The true measure of the work ahead here in Paris 
revealed itself at 8 a.m. this morning. After 
three days of negotiations and closed-door line 
edits, a new draft agreement was released for 
public consumption. And while the flaws and 
shortcomings of this latest incarnation are hyper 
dependent on whom exactly you are speaking with, 
one thing is certain; progress towards a real and 
meaningful deal is actually happening. It is 
certainly baby stepping along, but it is getting there. Well, maybe.

First and foremost, the draft has managed to both 
grow and shrink from its pre-conference size. The 
overall length has been reduced to just 50 pages, 
and the total word count has been cut by about 8 
percent, both metrics providing glimmers of 
growing consensus among the nearly 200 countries 
trying to negotiate the deal. The number of 
“options” in the draft — areas representing more 
significant issues of discord between parties — 
has been similarly reduced from a total of 228 
just a few days ago to some 205.
[]

By Kodiak Greenwood

Al Gore, global warming activist and former U.S. 
Vice President, spoke about the financial risks 
of investing in fossil fuels and the rapidly 
growing rewards of putting money behind renewables.

Even more demonstrative of inching towards a 
compromise is that certain big-ticket sections of 
the document have been successfully hashed out to 
the point where they no longer have any brackets 
left to be resolved. (Brackets within the draft 
treaty’s 26 “articles” signify established points 
of contention between countries, and all of them 
must be figured out or stricken before a vote on 
the agreement can be called for).

The section devoted to detailing how a new 
climate deal would be implemented around the 
world had been successfully worked over to the 
point of zero brackets remaining, while the 
section dedicated to transparency and how exactly 
countries will be monitored for their efforts in 
achieving CO2 reduction mandates — an area that 
was the primary sticking point six years ago in 
Copenhagen — has been significantly reduced to 
the point that even the pessimists think this 
article will not be a deal breaker this time 
around. “For a Thursday of the first week, there 
has been some great progress made,” observed John 
O. Niles, a veteran of more than a dozen COP 
climate talks, Director of the Carbon Institute, 
former UCSB lecturer, and current Board of 
Directors member for the Tropical Forest Group.

On the less than ideal side of the spectrum is 
the growing number of brackets present in the 
overall document. At the conference’s kickoff, 
that figure was at 1,617. Today it was at 1,718. 
Folks well versed with this process, however, are 
quick to point out that an uptick in brackets 
during week one is to be expected when you 
consider the myriad of national views seeking to 
be memorialized in any potential agreement. But 
still, that increase only works to further 
complicate an already cartoonishly tedious 
process that is, in Niles’ description, akin to 
“trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube as fast as 
possible with 190-plus other sets of hands on the same cube.”
[]

By Kodiak Greenwood

Carbon Institute Director and former UCSB 
lecturer John O. Niles briefs his team in an 
informal early morning meeting of the minds.

Easily the most disturbing — and potentially 
fatal to the process — development here on day 
four was the late in the afternoon power move by 
the G-77 plus China group, an affiliation of the 
134 less developed and wealthy nations, including 
India. Coming just shy of a diplomatic version of 
giving the middle finger, the group collectively 
accused heavyweight developed nations like the 
United States — and European powers like Great 
Britain and Germany — of undercutting the 
negotiating process, violating conference 
protocol, and trying to introduce language into 
the draft agreement that allows them to wiggle 
out of certain and critical carbon reduction 
requirements and add conditions to the funding 
pledges to less fortunate countries. The latter 
providing a lynchpin element to any possible deal 
that would help poorer countries’ individual 
efforts to meet treaty goals and adapt to a 
changing planet without going bankrupt.

In other words, the U.S. and company are trying 
to force all nations into one box, when the 
widespread feeling for days has been that such an 
effort would be hugely obstructive to a 
successful deal. Su Wei, the head of China’s 
delegation, said sternly, “The basic facts do not 
change. The problem has been caused by developed 
countries. They need to take their historical 
responsibility into account and take the lead in reducing greenhouse gas.”

The head of the G-77, South Africa’s Nozipho 
Mxakato-Diseko, added in an official statement, 
“Any attempt to replace the core obligation of 
developed countries with a number of arbitrarily 
identified conditions is a violation of the 
rules-based multilateral process and threatens an 
outcome here in Paris
This narrative serves 
narrow national interests of developed countries 
and says little about reality.”

Things only got more dramatic from there when, at 
the end of the day’s open negotiating session on 
the draft text, the G-77 hastily requested a 
20-minute break and then proceeded to walk out 
for over an hour. That is more than two-thirds of 
all the countries present choosing to walk away 
in anger. Upon their return, they requested that 
all language in the draft about the contested 
funding issues be pulled from the main draft and 
be tackled in a separate document going foreword, 
an added degree of difficulty that only ups the 
ante of brokering a deal on time.

That is it for today from the front lines of The 
Paris Project. Tune in tomorrow as the class 
warfare between the world’s have and have-nots 
continues to rear its head in our collective 
effort to save the only home our species has ever known

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(805) 962-2571
P.O. Box 92156, Santa Barbara, CA 93190
margie at sbpermaculture.org
http://www.sbpermaculture.org

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