Forward On Climate Rally: 50,000 People Say No To Tar Sands And Make History In The US

On February 17th, I was part of history. 50,000 people from around North America traveled to Washington DC for the Forward on Climate rally–the largest climate rally in US history. We protested the Keystone XL pipeline and the expansion of tar sands oil.

Tar sands exploitation was recently identified as one of 14 “carbon bombs.” A mixture of clay, sand, water, and bitumen (a hydrocarbon that can be processed into crude oil), tar sands is extracted from under Canada’s Boreal Forest. It is a gooey tar-like substance that must be diluted with toxic carcinogenic chemicals to get through a pipeline. Compared to conventional oil, it is 70 times more viscous, 20 times more acidic, and has three times the spill rate. Producing crude from tar sands also emits three times more greenhouse gas emissions than producing conventional oil. If fully exploited, the combustion of these fossil fuel reserves would cause global temperatures to rise between 5 and 6 degrees Celsius--a level of warming that the World Bank deemed un-adaptable. According to climate scientist James Hanse, “Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history.”

What’s more: the extraction of tar sands has devastating effects on local communities, especially First Nation peoples. Chemicals from the extraction site contaminate local water sources, endangering drinking water and affecting wildlife in the region. These communities continue to live traditional lifestyles, living off of the land and depending on a reciprocal relationship with Mother Earth. Yet carcinogens from tar sands infect the air and water, pollution causes asthma and other health problems, and local ecosystems are threatened.

Clearly, tar sands is not merely an issue about climate. It is intrinsically tied to social justice and human rights. People are suffering now because of tar sands extraction. And many more will pay in the future for the price of uninhibited fossil fuel combustion.

That is why it must stop.

Although 50,000 is a small number compared to all the climate activists and human beings out there, we still came together to create the largest climate rally in US history. And I felt hopeful. Our voices carry more moral authority than any other generations before us because, as Reverend Lennox Yearwood said at the rally: “While they [civil rights activists] were fighting for equality, we are fighting for existence.”

The rally began with a series of inspiring speakers, including Reverend Lennox Yearwood, Bill McKibben, Michael Brune (head of the Sierra Club), and First Nation representatives. But my favorite speaker was Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). He explained how the fossil fuel industry has control of the US government and how Congress was “sleepwalking” through the climate crisis. He said that it was the people’s responsibility to push their elected officials to take action, to wake up, to see the urgency, and to take a moral stand.

My philosophy and goal as an environmental activist has always been to focus on the grassroots. I believe in building a movement from the bottom-up, by talking with individuals and through education. Politicians will only act when they see that their constituents care. And so it is up to each individual to use their voice and make it heard. But although I have always focused on grass roots, I have never seen the national and international grassroots movements come together with so much power. We all create our movements locally. But it is combining our collective power that is our ultimate goal. Yesterday was a powerful example of solidarity.

Yet the tar sands are just one of 14 global carbon bombs that cannot go off. We are doing our best here in the US to stave off the fossil fuel industry. But this movement is needed in every single corner of the world. We are not talking about mobilizing one gender, class, or country as in past social movements. We are talking about touching every single human being on this planet. By understanding the problem, developing innovative solutions, focusing on grassroots power, and providing platforms for action, we can create the movement that will not only change our world–but save it.

This is why the work of CliMates is so crucial. We need to reach out beyond traditional audiences and develop new tactics for engagement and mobilization. We can’t rely on precedents because there is none. We are the generation that must develop new solutions. And it is our collective ingenuity, passion, and brain-power that will chart a new course for humanity!

By Chloe Maxmin

Harvard College, Class of 2015

Founder, First Here, Then Everywhere

http://www.firstheretheneverywhere.org

Twitter: chloemaxmin

What we take from Doha

Last month, just a few days after the end of COP 18, many NGOs organized a debriefing of the negotiations. CliMates did one, as well as 4D, a French NGO committed to advancing sustainable development. What is really interesting in such moments is the diversity of feelings from people coming back from the summits. I had the same impression after Rio+20. It’s almost possible to draw a gallery of the typical reactions, but that’s what I’ll try to do with the example of the four speakers of this 4D conference.

One of the speakers of this conference was Patrice Burger, Director of CARI (CARI is a NGO which is helping African populations in arid areas, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and in the North Africa). He was very disappointed by the process he discovered in Qatar, and even more by the outcome of the COP. Mr Burger didn’t agree on the way the discussions were structured, nor on the country which had been chosen to organize the conference. He also found civil society mobilization not strong enough. At the end of his speech he tried to draw some positive remarks, based on his personal experience or some side events. This reaction is a classical reaction of someone coming back from his first international summit. These people are usually very passionate and expect a lot, but then discover the heaviness and the difficulties of the UN process.

The second profile in this gallery is that of the specialist like Ludovic Larbodiere from the French Ministry of Agriculture. He went to Doha to listen and take part to the discussion on the very specific point of agriculture. His analysis is more positive, because he does not try to have a holistic approach but focuses instead on technical progresses. According to him, the question of agriculture is just getting into the climate change debate. He explained that this topic was very specific compared to the others especially because of its sectorial approach of the problem. Through this particular theme, he could give us a particular reading of the whole process and the way positions were crystallized.

The third category is that of country-centred people, like Joaquim Diniz from Brazil. This researcher went to Doha to present the experience of his country with agro-ecology. He only spoke about the solution Brazil found and the way his country can take part to a more global answer to climate change. On a related noted, we could also present the point of view of lobbyists who see the outcomes only in relation to the individual interest they defend. The feeling of an national delegate can complete this gallery as well. As we were able to notice at the CliMates debriefing conference, an experienced negotiator has a slightly different view on what happened. Thus, Paul Watkinson, the head negotiator for France, was not as negative as NGOs because he could really focus on the progresses and realize all the energy that was needed to reach them.

The last profile I want to highlight is the NGOs expert. Pierre Radanne for instance, is a French civil society leader; he has been engaged in environmental issues for decades. At the 4D conference he could draw a much more precise and balanced picture of what happened in Qatar. His analysis started with a brief historical overview : he underlined how the negotiations progressively became broader by taking into account always more topics. He then went on to describe what was the situation just before Doha – according to him, the state of the negotiations did not really allow to expect a lot from this COP. The Kyoto objectives were not reached, financing climate mitigation became harder because of the crisis and the recent evaluation of the Clean Development Mechanisms (CDM) was quite negative. Within this worrying context, Pierre Radanne listed four objectives for Doha: finalizing the discussions on a 2nd Kyoto engagement period, finding a solution to catch up a better emission patch, making the green fund working and precising the content of the Durban platform. We could easily understand that there were not just objectives but challenges. Finally the Doha agreement ended the discussion on the 2013-2020 period, which was not done until the very end of the negotiations. Every country took the minimal commitments but for Pierre Radanne, “the job was done”. Nothing was done concerning the finance question and almost not progresses can be recorded related to the post 2020 period. 2015 became the new horizon for the discussions on many topics like the Durban platform.

2015, this is probably the main point to keep in mind after Doha. Renewed energy and commitment are probably the best way to define individuals who never drop out. Apparently when you start understanding the UN process, you don’t want to forget it but you cannot totally trust it either. Experienced activists and organizations try to find innovative ways to prepare the next stage of the process and to keep going. At the end of his intervention, Pierre Radanne exposed his project to launch an international experts discussion to define a fair repartition of CO2 emissions reductions. Experienced people do not want to fight again nor act outside the official process, they want to support it and provide elements of solutions to help it. They were probably the most interesting people of this gallery !

“Doha did not go really well, and that’s for the best. The worst would have happened if there had not been any tensions at all” P. Radanne

The Doha Bulletin: A summary of two weeks at COP18

First off, my apologies for posting this now, I should have done so in December. Nonetheless, i hope you enjoy reading it, your comments as always are very much appreciated. 

The thrilling 12 days at Doha for COP18 has brought a set of interrogations for me that I will probably need to digest through the coming months.

I’m torn between three major dilemmas, which I will describe as such:

- the high level of expertise needed to master the intricacies of the UNFCCC process vs. passionately advocating for climate justice on strict ideology and in effect being evicted of this very process

- keeping faith in multilateralism vs. being tempted to advocate for a “G20 for climate” which flies in the face of equity

-  very related to point (1)- abdicating to the UNFCCC paradigm which in effect is pushing for an ultra-commercialization of not only the climate but other common goods such as forests vs. becoming a pawn in this system which in return gives you more leverage to change it.

I could obviously write a book about each individual point, but I’m purposely thriving to write down a few thoughts on this notion as the issue at hand is obviously still fresh.

 

Expertise vs. Ideology

The UNFCCC framework is complicated, to say the least. It is the result of years of expert research and meetings and is only deeply grasped by a selected few. The very concepts of the Kyoto Protocol or REDD+ for example are subdivided in topics that experts often spend their careers on – just think of the innumerable literature that has been produced around clean development mechanisms (CDMs), or of the complexity that talking about intellectual property rights or technology transfers entails.  Climate change calls for major paradigm shifts in the way we produce, consume, trade, in other words, the way we go about our lives.  Experts and negotiators are very well aware of the urgency of the situation, they are fully conscious of the widening emissions gap for 2020, of the dire consequences of a +2C degree world and that the clock is ticking to find answers fast. Yet, and I noticed this happening to me as well, it is very easy to get sucked into and devoured by the “UN Machine”, to get consumed by a very technical meeting on joint implementation (JI), to get riled up about Poland’s AAUs, to despair over the lack of progress on Article 6, or to ponder about the closure of the AWG-LCA track and to forget about the reason why we’re here in the first place which is to… fight climate change.

Many members of NGOs, on the other hand, take a more aggressive stance based on ideological claimsand mechanically take themselves out of the negotiation game. On that note, while “ideologically” usually has a negative connotation, I actually tend to agree more with Greenpeace or Oxfam’s position on the climate change issue than with the path that the UNFCCC process is leading us to. Quite unfortunately, no one wants to listen to someone advocating for a fundamental paradigm shift (such as a 40% of GHG reductions for Europe, dividing the U.S. carbon-footprint by 5 by 2030, or unilaterally ending all fossil fuel subsidies), that is bad for business and hampers economic growth in the framework we abide to today. What is not mentioned enough is that party delegates are, before anything else, public servants defending national interests. A delegate’s mandate is to first and foremost defend the economy and the livelihoods of his fellow citizens, not to save our planet from global warming. I think there is a real mix-up made around this topic and the delineation of a negotiator’s mandate, and I feel that it of very little use to keep harassing people whose stances are fixed before the COP18 by political agendas and ministries.  This explains why negotiators are so precautious about making any form of substantial decisions at UNFCCC meetings: the repercussions on their countries’ economies could be enormous (or put more simply, whatever decision they take could be rejected by their national Parliaments).

                                                                                            

Source: Anderson K. and A. Bows (2008). ‘Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2020 emissions trends’   Philosophical Transactions A of the Royal Society No. 366 (http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/366/1882/3863.long)

Greenhouse gas emission scenarios for AB1 with emissions peaking in (a) 2015, (b) 2020 and (c) 2025.

(deforestation low, DL; deforestation high, DH)

Dark purple curve, low DL; black curve, low DH; blue curve, medium DL; red curve, medium DH; light purple curve, high DL; green curve, high DH.

These graphs show the mitigation efforts which will be required to advert a +2C rise in global temperature.

Developed countries economies are like speeding cars that need to make a quick turn to avoid a wall that’s fast approaching. They still have the possibility (but time is quickly running out!) to take a managed and progressive turn to avoid that wall. Solutions could include (cross-sectoral planning of their economies, (sorry to my right-wing friends here but the invisible hand just won’t cut it here!), generating a switch to less carbon-intensive sources of energies, elaborating innovative carbon pricing systems, and finding real ways to create additional and new sources of funding for adaptation.) Of course, they can also sit and wait for the day where the people in the driving seats will be forced, in order to avoid the wall, to take a very sharp turn, a turn which would create dramatic levels of social suffering and an immediate cut to all form of liberties (first and foremost the liberty to consume), as eco-fascist states would basically have to dictate what we buy, how we move, what we eat in order to achieve immediate and drastic cuts in GHG emissions in order to avoid an absolute collapse of the global ecosystem.

We can’t even levy the puniest of taxes on aviation and maritime activities, so I’ll let you play with your imagination to figure out what the type of civil strife we’d go through if someone dictated what type of food to eat. I still have enough faith (or naivety…you tell me!) to believe that human ingenuity will prevail sooner or later, and that we will avert a complete crash which would in effect lead to a near extinction of the human species as we know it.  But to go back to civil society, many like-minded environmentalists are asking for what I would call “sharp turn” measures, which if applied unreasonably fast would have disastrous impacts on economies, especially in the globalized context we are in today. Delegates and negotiators are simply not mandated to take far-reaching emissions cuts measures or spending pledges for adaptation that, back home would put in danger growth rates, deficits, and jobs back home-not to mention their own. The whole issue for climate change activists like ourselves is to be able to tactically place ourselves on the “climate change exchequer”. Do we want to become UNFCCC-geeks at the risk of losing touch with issue at hand, or radical activists at the risk of losing any form of political leverage?

Finally, if it wasn’t clear enough, we are certainly not on a “smooth turn” path right now, we are clearly and univocally heading towards a situation where we’ll have to make a “sharp turn” before 2050 if not earlier.  Making a smooth turn implies much greater ambition than what we are seeing today which makes our activism all the more necessary.

 

UN-wide multilateralism vs. a “G20 for climate”

An African delegate jokingly told me that the United States and China should get together in a climate G2 and solve on one end the mess that one has created (the U.S.) and on the other the mess that the other one is about to create (China) and that Africa was but collateral damage.  The United States before the start of COP18 also suggested that part of the agenda be moved to the Major Economies Forum, where the 19 countries responsible for 80% of world’s emissions could meet and talk about actions for reducing emission. These ideas, which by no means should be taken seriously at the moment, reflect a growing frustration over 20 years of failed attempts to remotely come close to substantial outcomes at the UNFCCC level.  The UN process, by nature, seeks to give a space for all member parties-which, despite its noble motives, significantly slows down any form of decision-taking. The result of this is that COPs (or at least what I got to witness at COP18) can become a space of deadlock, which could in extremely broad terms be described as follows:

-        Developing countries systematically go back to the common but differentiated responsibility (CBDR) notion (see segment 2 of my blog), to their shared imperative of eradicating poverty before all, their right to development and of the greater need for the adaptation fund. Not much can be asked, indeed in terms of mitigation from a citizen from Liberia who consumes 0.1 tons of CO2e a year compared to the average American’s 23 annual tons of CO2e emissions.

-        Developed countries systematically reject their shared historical responsibility (and will continue to do so) and push for a system where everyone must be on board in terms of mitigation (by everyone they also mean the BASIC countries, China in particular). This view has prevailed for now, as the Durban Platform is a system which should have “legal force” for all countries.

Unfortunately, these discourses are so often repeated on an hourly basis, at every single meeting and on every single subject that they quickly lose their argumentative punch. This worrisome perspective stroke me while I had the honor of representing France during a plenary session for ministerial speeches, during which I realized that after the 20^th consecutive speech, the Marshall Islands, Mozambique, and Liechtenstein were each given 8 minutes of speaking time to expose their view on the topic (that’s a two day process by the way, 193countries get a word), I had become insensitive to calls for more money for Africa, to messages on the threat of sea level rise to the survival of small Pacific islands, or to the plea for more global cohesiveness for emissions reductions (and voluntary emitting historical responsibility) for Europeans. This is a serious problem, it becomes increasingly difficult, as the days go by at the COP, to get emotionally “moved” and what you quickly get is a crowd of cynical and anesthetized people-usually good-willing and aware, but who become sour and basically know what to expect from a delegate simply by looking at which country he or she comes from.  As expressed in my expertise vs. ideology section, this further puts people out of touch with the very real and concrete implications of climate change. It also gives a reason for delegates to not budge from their stagnant positions: if my working peers keep their grounds and repeat an argument which is so far removed from what I’m willing to work with and that I’ve heard 19 times in the past hour, it gives me no strong incentive to fundamentally change mine. This is a broad generalization of course as compromise and unlikely alliances do happen, think about the European Union, Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS)- and Least Developed Countries (LDCs) coming together in 2011 to push the Durban deal through. However as a trend, there is a historical complacency around the COPs which calls into question the very structure and processes of the framework.   I have a tough time believing that climate change can be solved in smaller committees (read: in a Western-dominated group of usual suspects (read: G20) that keep talking about mitigation efforts and magically forget their responsibility in the mess we’re in today).  Climate change is a global challenge which will have to be handled collectively and inclusively. Yet it is tempting to believe that smaller groups could deal with it better and that it is urgent to discuss a fundamental reform of a UNFCCC process that has now proven throughout the years to be inefficient.

 

Commercialization

The final elephant in the room is that the UNFCCC is constructing a model right now which is primarily based on compensation and not on net reduction of GHGs. Moreover, the current paradigm is pushing towards an ever-increasing commercialization of the natural space: we are not only putting a price on carbon, but also on forests and trees, and the concept of payment for ecosystem services (i.e monetizing services rendered by natural phenomena) is fast expanding.

This means that we are not dealing with the root problem, which is insatiable consumerist habits on a finite planet.  Climate change is merely being reframed into a financial market problem.  CDMs have alternatively been called “Community Disempowerment Mechanisms”, “Commodity Development Machine” or “Chinese Development Mechanism” (48% of CDM finance go to projects are in China). We are seeking to put a cash value on trees, aquatic ecosystems, mangroves, and bee pollination in order create the new commodity market of the 21^st century, which will be passed on the false illusion that we are dealing with climate change when we are in reality playing into the hands of the system that created the mess in the first place. Despite the few cries from the ALBA group, primarily Bolivia, Venezuela, and Cuba and the occasional indigenous NGO contingent, this issue mostly goes unheard in the COPs. The next frontier for climate profiteering is geoengineering, which goes from the controversial (carbon capture and storage, ‘climate ready’ GMO crops) to the potentially catastrophic, including and not limited to: ocean fertilization with iron, solar radiation management (SRM) by blasting sulphate particles in the atmosphere to reflect sunlight, Artic ice covering , firing silver iodide in clouds to produce rain etc…  

 

CliMates in the future

Despite my heavy criticism of the COP18 process, this was above all a tremendous and enriching learning experience for me, and an opportunity to meet incredible people who often offered me new perspectives on how to think about climate change. It’s a beautiful and deeply human forum with its qualities and its flaws, which brings together thousands of people from all cultures and walks of life around a topic which we are all passionate about. In a way, CliMates is a tiny microcosm of this dynamic. 2015 is going to be crucial year as a new climate treaty is to be signed and hopefully provoke a major paradigm shift. As I’ve said before, this gives us three years to continue discussing, researching, LEARNING, and coming up with innovative solutions to climate change. I would like for us to become a reference for this crucial COP21 which is set to be take place in Paris. I believe it is an interesting framework to use and work with as we contribute to the push towards putting climate change on political maps everywhere.

 

Hearing no objections, it is so decided.

Here we are at last. COP18 ended abruptly on Saturday evening, after nearly 24 hours of apparent stand-still and postponing. Friday night had managed to close both AWG-LCA (for good) and ADP, forwarding any unresolved issues to ministerial consultations and/or to the COP/CMP. And from then on… Not much happened as far as we could see, apart from the stock-taking plenary being postponed to 1am, then 3am, then 7.30am. Ministers talked in corridors or behind closed doors, people aimlessly roamed the plenary rooms, CCTV kept announcing Plenaries about to start 2 hours ago, Twitter stormed over Loss & Damage talks, Youth activists demonstrated in the empty dark halls, and people gradually collapsed sleeping on couches.

On Saturday morning, texts were released – on paper, which provoked some sort of good-humored riot, since everybody had been yearning for printed negotiation texts for the past two weeks (Papersmart wasn’t so smart, and mostly meant that nobody knew very well what was negotiated, when and where). The still very relaxed President Al-Attiyah gave a memorable statement, saying that he could re-open negotiations on the text, but that it would take too long and not lead anywhere better, that anyway, the better was the enemy of the good, and that the fact that nobody was satisfied with the package was a good indication that it was balanced. Nobody objected anything when he proposed to open the COP/CMP as soon as possible, and, very thankful for the Parties’ silence, he gave everybody 90 minutes to read everything and come back. Ninety very, very long minutes.

This was the beginning of a long day of waiting for something to happen and not daring to blink because it could just be any moment. In a faithful (though condensed) re-enaction of Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe, we watched from the back of the plenary room, reading the texts over and over again.

Just when the CMP plenary seemed ready to start, the Secretariat called for Parties with commitments in the amended Annex B to the Kyoto Protocol to submit their written consent. That could have been quick, but wasn’t. It took a good deal of time (I’m not sure how much, your sense of time gets distorted in such settings) of blocking the central aisles, moving to a closed room, trying to reach Angela Merkel on the phone and God knows what else for the EU to get Poland in and finally be able to sign.
But then, for some reasons (related to Russian hot air and US pride, from what I’ve undersood), new clusters of disagreement filled the central aisle of the Plenary room, and things started not-happening again. Rumors of blocking coming from all sides started to emerge, and the outlook was as grim as it could be.

At around 7pm, the UNFCCC, in a tweet of despair, seemed to have no idea how this was all going to end – if it ever was?

One hour later, all was over. The President opened the CMP, heard no objection, pounded his gavel, and so decided, closed the CMP, opened the COP, heard no objection, pounded his gavel, and so decided. In the blink of an eye, the four texts were hammered to adoption. The room clapped the newly found Accord. In less than five minutes, what was a tangly negotiating muddle turned into a not quite sufficient but unanimous Gateway to increased ambition in 2015. Parties gave long objections that could now be nothing more than mere comments, Filippino negotiator Naradev Saño expressed his bitter disappointment and issued a long round of thanks to Parties and NGOs that had supported the Philippines, particularly Youth. Parties congratulated themselves, some expressing strong dissastisfaction, NGOs lamented the lack of ambition of the text, and Youth organizations protested once again. And that was it.

The Doha Bulletin: December 7th

Things have been getting crazier this week as the high-level segment has begun. It is now perfectly normal to walk by Ban Ki Moon in the corridors, or to have a group of BASIC countries ministers sitting down on the table next to yours for some informal corridor talks on the future of the Durban Platform.

As to where how negotiations have been progressing this far, it is getting harder to keep track. One sure thing, though, is that they’re (as usual) likely to stretch late into the night.

Negotiators have broken down into various groups dealing with different agenda items, most of the work yesterday was going on behind closed doors, and nobody has a clear idea of when the very last plenaries will be able to start. Not to make things any easier, this is a paperless COP, which means information is never going to be handed over to you before you’ve started thinking about looking for it.

As you know, negotiations this week have been going through three streams: Good Ol’ AWG-KP and AWG-LCA, and the young and (presumably) fresh ADP.

The President called for an informal stock-taking plenary earlier this afternoon, so as to get a better view of the remaining work. AWG-KP, still working on KP 2, closed yesterday and forwarded unresolved issues to the CMP (Conference serving as the Meeting of the Parties of the Kyoto Protocol). Ministers Luiz Alberto Figueireido Machado from Brazil and ard Vegar Solhjell from Norway are conducting ministerial consultations on KP issues at the moment. The current text has numbers, which is a step forward from Durban, but is still crammed with brackets and footnotes and options.

AWG-LCA, hopelessly tangled in brackets over the Bali Action Plan, is supposed to be closed for good at the end of this COP, and is going through a slow and painful agony. Yesterday afternoon, the Maldives and Switzerland started conducting ministerial consultations on finance, which are still going on right now. The finance part aside, a draft streamlined text on LCA was circulated this morning. As I am writing, I am sitting in Plenary Room 2, where the AWG-LCA closing plenary was scheduled to start one hour ago.

ADP is expected to deliver a work programme on the Durban Platform and to pave the way to the 2015 deal, which so far implies

1. Defining what this outcome “with a legal force” “applicable to all” “under the Convention” means, and
2. finding ways to bridge the ambition gap.

A draft text was made available, and according to the ADP Co-Chair most of the issues can be dealt with finalising the text. Groups are also working on Loss and Damage, Climate Technology Center and Network, and Reporting Mechanisms. Things seems to be revolving about reaching a “balanced package”, the contours of which are now getting clearer, according to the President.

However, he has still not forwarded the work of the various groups to the COP, and called for another informal stock-taking plenary this evening at 6pm. He looked surprisingly relaxed for a COP President, inserting jokes between each interventions and not seeming too concerned about time constraints. “I am close to my home, I am in no rush”, he said with a smile, “if you wish to go home soon, finish the text, it is in your hands”. Overall, the atmosphere doesn’t feel particularly tense, even though many Parties stressed that time was running out – but, when it comes to climate negotiations, time has now been running out for long enough for every one to get used to it…

[This is a snapshot from earlier today. It could not be posted immediately as for some unspecified reason wireless refused to work in the Plenary room. Since it was written, the AWG-LCA text has been forwarded to the COP, the AWG-LCA has been closed, and the President appointed two ministers to assist him in conducing consultations on "a limited set of critical concerns" to be addressed before presenting the LCA text to the COP.

Or, as Watkinson says:

]

The Doha Bulletin: December 3rd

I’ve talked about the United States in my preceding post. Now a little bit more about Kyoto.

The Kyoto Protocol only takes into account a little over 15% of current emissions. The importance of committing to a second period, in my view, isn’t so much the impact that it will have on reduction cuts. We are currently on a catastrophic path in terms of the emission gap from here to 2020 anyways. To be more precise, in order to limit global warming to 2C by 2100, global emissions by then should not surpass 44 gigatons  of CO2-equivalent per year (or “CO2e” as I’ve explained in an earlier post: for a given mixture of greenhouse gas, the amount of CO2 that would have the same global warming potential). However, in the most ambitious of pledges (read: the ones that aren’t and won’t happen because of lack of political will) under the Copenhagen Accord, we are still falling short by 5 to 9 gigatons of CO2e per year.

Most Annex I countries (i.e  rich countries who ratified Kyoto) are already on track to reducing their emissions as they position themselves to be major players in the green industry (renewable energies, smart grids, lean production, think of Germany) and environmental awareness is growing in the general public. Don’t get me wrong here, Kyoto is I’ve repeated before, a highly unambitious deal, but it’s not a “make or break” issue for reduction of emissions per se. If we are very serious about limiting global temperature increase to 2C by 2100, we will have to revise our ambitions anyways, and not only Annex-I countries and there 15% emissions, we’re talking about a global and honest conversation amongst all parties involved in the UN climate proceedings. This is the idea behind the Durban Platform which was agreed upon last year at COP17, to get every country on board by 2015 to work towards global pledges in order to limit global warming to 2C degrees or less by the end of the century.

Yet Kyoto2 is crucial because without it, the world will be thrown into a juridical void without any framing structure to track emissions or pledges in a situation that could last until 2020 when a new climate regime is to take effect. Additionally, Kyoto creates a global carbon market that contributes to funding renewable energy and deforestation projects in the developing world. In other words, Kyoto provides a framework for the new climate regime that should be signed in 2015.

Finally, and as Brazilian negotiator Andrea Correa do Lago puts it “If rich countries which have the financial means, have technology, have a stable population, already have a large middle class, think they cannot reduce [emissions] and work to fight climate change, how can they ever think that developing countries can do it?  That is why the Kyoto Protocol has to be kept alive.”

On to another topic. Keeping fossil fuels where they belong which is in the ground. This is fast becoming a hot topic in climate circles and I encourage to follow up on it (a good start is with Bill McKibben and his #dothemath campaign).  We have 565 gigatons of carbon dioxide left to burn if we want a pretty good chance (80%) of staying within the 2C limit. This is taking into consideration that there is 2795 gigatons of carbon of fossil fuel reserves left, or five times that amount. In other words, we desperately have to start thinking of incentives to keep these reserves that have cheaply fueled 200 years-worth of industrialization in the ground. To restate, that’s over 2/3 of proven fossil fuel reserves that need to stay in the ground and away from the big dollar hungry oil companies. Strategies include ending massive fuel subsidies which right amount to totals five times greater than climate finance, compensation mechanisms for countries or companies to disinvest from fossil fuels, and targeted measures to have cheaper and better access to renewable energies.  Catch up on the issue because this is about to become a very prominent element of climate change talk (it certainly is already but I reckon it will become a central part of the conversation). We simply cannot conciliate pursued fossil fuel extraction and ambitious climate goals at the same time.

 

The Doha Bulletin: December 2nd

 Nauru representing the AOSIS (Associations of Small Island States) is making an aggressive play in Kyoto Protocol conversations by pushing for a more ambitious financial pledges and asking for 30% emission reduction cuts for the European Union.  While this effort to kick-start can only be applauded, this move endangers the fragile alliance that AOSIS and the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) group had forged with the European Union last year in order to get the Durban Platform through in extremis. Not sure what to think about this as the European Union “only” contributes 10% of worldwide GHG and that breaking this trust that was established last year between AOSIS-LDCs-EU could affect progress on the ADP platform which in the long-run will determine what the future climate regime looks like.

Talking about the future climate regime, United States negotiator Jonathan Pershing referring to the 2015 climate treaty, made a statement yesterday repeating that the US was unwilling to sign up to a climate deal that requires the country to make substantial cuts in its emissions. It’s difficult for me to get angry at Mr. Pershing as I fully understand that the poor man -who is certainly more aware of the destructive impact U.S’s position on climate negotiations than the entire cliMates organization combined- has his hands tied behind his back by a political context in the United States. His Congress is still dominated by a party advocating climate denial as an official political stance. That said, if the United States doesn’t budge from this stance, we are heading for a deadlock of the apocalyptical kind here in the UN climate negotiation progress.

The Copenhagen Accord and the Durban Platform have sealed the fate of the top-down approach anyways, as we are increasingly moving towards a system where prominent countries like the United States or China will systematically engage in tactical strategies to prevent significant emission reduction and rather push for voluntary pledges assorted with verification systems. One of the importance of the committing to a second period of Kyoto (which hopefully I’ll get to write about in a little bit more detail in a following post) is that it provides a juridical safeguard against the Wild Wild West bottom-up approach that the United States is seeking to impose on the UN climate system which in effect would guarantee that we never make the substantial cut need to avert climate disasters.

My fellow cliMates Jose asked me today in a mail if he should still have faith? The answer is a resounding yes, and my first argument is of blatant simplicity and plainness: we have to keep faith because losing hope is not an option in the face of what humanity is heading towards if we don’t address climate change. We don’t lose faith because we know and that gives us the responsibility to react. Finally, we don’t lose hope because the window to avert potential disaster is still open.  Kyoto2 is a step in the right direction.  After that, we’ll hit the drawing board again, and cliMates is a space to do this. We mobilize, we federate, we go back to the grassroots level and we act. Jonathan Pershing also said on Wednesday that he lacks “public support” to make substantial cuts. That’s where we come in and create that support, and not only in United States but in every single country that is represented in the UNFCCC process. Lack of public support cannot be an excuse for not addressing climate change anymore and it is our role to change this, starting now.  There is no time for losing faith.