COP21: Wow! What a Press Conference!

At exactly 10:51 (GMT) today the French Foreign Minister and COP21 President Laurent Fabius opened a press conference to unveil the final draft of a global climate change agreement that is to be put before the last plenary meeting of the summit.

Fabius assured us that the summit had been a complete success, this new draft would save the World from climate change and urged us all to sign up.

Next UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon took the microphone and assured us of almost exactly the same thing.

Finally French President Francois Hollande spoke and said much the same thing. He even urged us all to sign up as the perfect response to the Paris Massacres of November 13th (13/11/15).

As I said at the start of the summit that anyone who urges an agreement be signed as a way to stand up to terrorism gets a slap I'm interpreting that as a coded way for Hollande to disown the draft.

We then reached to point where this new draft would be handed out for us all to read and assess. At this point Fabius issued a diplomatic version of the following statement;

"When I said that the draft was ready I didn't mean that it was "ready" in the traditional sense. I meant that I wanted to hold a press conference announcing that it was ready so I could bask in the glow of worldwide media attention and the warm applause of the room.

The draft might be ready in a couple of hours. So .... Long lunch?"

Roughly two hours later that draft did finally appear. The plenary at which it will be discussed is scheduled to start at 16:30 - roughly an hour from now. As a result I clearly won't be able to provide a line-by-line break down.

However the bulk of the draft is the same as the draft that was released on Thursday (10/12/15) evening.

That draft - in all but name - admitted that the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform (ADP) had failed in its work of producing the basis of an agreement for discussion. As a result it established the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Paris Agreement (APA) to continue the work of the ADP.

However the refusal to formally admit that the ADP has failed in its task means that the APA will be left with a greatly reduced mandate with which to complete the ADP's work. It will also be beholden to an agreement that in many way prohibits it from completing the ADP's work.

On Thursday I highlight two core barriers to effective climate change action imposed the the agreement; The clause that commits nations to Absolute Emission Reductions (AER's) and the use of 5 year commitment cycles.

The AER clause address something which is known in the jargon as "backsliding." Essentially this is when a nation reverses any emission reductions it has made by starting to grow its emissions again. Obviously this is something that any agreement will have to prevent.

However committing nations that have made AER's in the past to continue making AER's ignores the fact that - as I discussed yesterday - there will come a point where certain nations will no longer be able to cut their emissions any further.

Therefore the only way for them to proceed would be to keep their emissions at that absolute minimum level by making Intensity Reductions on future economic growth accompanied by increased financial support to nations that are in a position to make AER's.

The wording of Thursday's (10/12/15) prevents that from happening.

Much worse then that is also provides a massive disincentive for nations such as China and India who are on the brink of doing so from submitting their first AER's.

Today's draft removes that specific clause but replaces it with a much worse version.

Paragraph 4 of Article 4 brings back the binary differentiation of the Kyoto Protocol by forcing "developed" parties to make AER's while the "developing" parties are under no obligation to do anything at all. Yet the draft makes no attempt to define what "developed" or "developing" actually means.

This means that we still have the problem of nations who have hit their absolute reduction limit being unable to work with nations that haven't by moving to partnered Intensity Reductions. It also gives nations that have yet to make AER's free reign to never make AER's.

In short it is the worst of both worlds.

The discussion over whether commitment cycles should be 5 years long or 10 years long has itself lasted almost 5 years.

In that time I have both written and read extensive arguments of why 5 year cycles are unworkable. However the only thing I have heard in their defence is that US President Barack Obama wants them.

As such it only seems appropriate that I use the US' own INDC to demonstrate why 5 year commitment cycles are unworkable.

That INDC intends to reduce the US' emissions from the 2005 baseline by 26% in the 5 years between 2020 and 2025. The main mechanism for this reduction is to use existing legislation such as the Clean Air Act and the Energy Policy Act to force power stations and vehicle manufacturers to implement technology to reduce their emissions.

I think it is clear to all that President Obama will assess the success or failure of this INDC on how many favourable Re-Tweets or "Likes" it receives on social media.

Looking at the way the "Black Lives Matter" hashtag destroyed the Democrat Party at the 2014 mid-term elections it's clear that Obama isn't even that interested in votes providing the headlines are all favourable.

However in order to assess whether the US' INDC will actually do anything to reduce green house gas (ghg) emissions let alone reduce them to the point that will keep the world from runaway 3C warming we're going to have to apply much more rigorous tests.

The first of these will be to see whether the INDC's inventive use of existing legislation will be ruled lawful by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). Obama clearly thinks it will while the Republicans think it won't. I personally think that Obama is pushing his luck.

In any event it will take about a year for the legal challenges to make it through the US' lower Courts. It will then take at least another year for SCOTUS to make its ruling.

If SCOTUS rules the proposals lawful we will then have to wait for the power stations and vehicle manufacturers to implement the technological changes needed to bring them in line with the new emission standards.

Exactly how long they will have to comply is likely to be a very large part of the SCOTUS ruling. However I think that reasonably you're looking at around another two years.

We will then have to wait another year to check that the power stations and the vehicle manufacturers have complied with the law and installed the new technology. After that we will then have to wait another year to check whether the technology actually delivers in the field the reductions promised in the laboratory.

Since the US INDC was published there was actually a small story about vehicle emissions testing. Apparently the real world emissions of certain vehicles bore absolutely no resemblance to the emission levels shown in laboratory tests. I'm not sure if anyone's heard about this?

So the absolute minimum time for the US INDC to be implemented and assessed will be 6 years.

However under a 5 year commitment cycle the US would have already been forced to submit its next INDC without knowing whether its previous INDC had even been implemented let alone effective.

The use of 5 year commitment cycles also prevents there being an ex post review. As I've said throughout this a core mechanism to address the vital issues of Fairness & Ambition, Transparency and Finance by formally allowing parties to question what other parties are doing.

It is probably most important to the area of capacity building. Although I don't wish to be offensive there are clearly nations on earth who don't share the advanced political and legal frameworks of other nations on earth. The peer review process allows nations to share the little tricks they use and learn from each other.

This flow of knowledge isn't automatically from developed countries to developing countries. For example UK politics has recently got itself all excited over the issue of Child Tax Credits. This is a scheme that was simply stolen from Brazilian President Lula.

With the capacity building that would take place during the peer review process being so low cost that many would probably not even notice that it was happening it seems insane that nations - particularly developing ones - would reject it.

So the issue over 10 year cycles versus 5 year cycles is no more a negotiating point that can be compromised on then a discussion about whether the Earth orbits the Sun.

The people backing 5 years are simply wrong.

The current drafts attitude towards capacity building is actually pretty appalling.

Paragraph 10 of Article 7 clearly states that adaptation plans must not place additional burdens on developing nations.

Rather like going to the gym to build muscle the entire purpose of capacity building is to gradually increase the burden on nations to bring them up to a higher standard. What we need to prevent is "undue" burdens being placed on nations.

That specific wording of the draft actually produces a massive loophole for wealthy nations to reduce their funding. If poorer nations do not submit viable adaptation plans then there is no guarantee that funding from the Green Climate Fund (GCF) will actually help with adaptation.

If GCF funds aren't spent on the purpose for which they're assigned then people are simply going to stop funding the GCF.

Despite the high aspirations of the text we all already know that this USD100bn of annual funding to the GCF is a complete joke. 


As for Fabius' press conference claim that this agreement is legally enforceable Paragraph 2 of Article 15 makes quite clear that any compliance panel will be non-punitive. That means that not only can't you impose a fine on a nation for failing to deliver its commitments you can't even write a strongly worded letter of complaint.

Fabius' claim is therefore what is known in the trade as;

"A LIE."

17:00 on 12/12/15 (UK date).

Edited at around 21:45 on 12/12/15 (UK date) to add;

Following a delay of several hours the COP21 did decide to adopt today's draft without changes.

That means that the only difference between now and when I wrote the above is that nations have been stupid enough to adopt a draft that has very clear structural errors.

Shortly US President Obama will address the nation telling them what he thinks has been agreed. It won't be true. 

This is actually quite a common problem in negotiations where sleep deprived negotiators pumped up on adrenaline think they've secured concessions from the opposite numbers. Then when they've had a little sleep
and the adrenaline crash has passed they're left with the words that are actually on the page rather then the words that were in their heads in those final delirious moments.

A prime example of this will be Obama's assertion that "Nearly 200 countries including China and India have committed to reducing carbon pollution." 

The commitment to reducing carbon pollution/emissions is laid out in Article 4. As I pointed out above paragraph 4 of Article 4 only commits developed parties to making absolute reductions. As the text offers no definition of the term "developed" it can only mean the definition used in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)

This defines developed as the 36 nations listed under Annex I of the Kyoto Protocol. 28 of those nations are now members of the European Union (EU).

So the agreement doesn't commit nearly 200 nations to reducing emissions. It commits the EU and 8 others to reducing emissions. China and India - two of the three largest emitters - are free to do as they please. As it failed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol it is debatable whether the US - the second largest emitter - is even committed to reducing emissions.

Paragraph 4 of Article 4 was written at completely the last moment between me flagging up the problem with draft late on Thursday and the new draft being produced today. I gather negotiators were operating on less then three hours sleep at the time.

The several hour delay between the closing plenary's scheduled start and its actual start was caused by a US request to; "Check the Spelling & Grammar of Paragraph 4 of Article 4."

This struck me as the US realising at the last moment that it had suddenly made a horrific mistake. However because they were under strict Presidential orders to drive through the agreement at any cost they were hoping the EU would pick up on the US' mistake and veto the agreement on the US' behalf.

After all once the error comes to light the US will claim that because it did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol it's not bound by the clause. Therefore it will only be the EU's economy that is held back.

Unfortunately the EU has become so used to giving Obama whatever he wants - no matter how self-destructive - they didn't pick up on this in time.

The other thing that Obama will tell you is that the agreement will limit global temperature change to below 2C. Again it won't.

Back at the October UNFCCC meeting where Obama's death text was introduced a report on the collective effect of all the submitted INDC's would have was produced by the Secretariat.

Based on all INDC's being fully implemented - it seems unlikely that the US' will be - there is a between 1% and 58% chance of global temperatures being held below 2C. The 58% figure is the extreme outlier so we're really talking about a 20-30% chance.

The much more likely scenario is that global temperatures will continue to rise towards their current target of a 3.5C rise. Anything above 3C at the global climate system will reach a tipping point at which climate change cannot be stopped.

I'm not sure if Obama will focus on this so much by Laurent Fabius and French President Francois Hollande are still claiming that the agreement is legally binding. 

As I explained above that is just a blatant and wilful lie.

So my sentiment to all this is the same as it was last Saturday;

The Fight Against Climate Change: June 3rd 1992 - December 12th 2015. May She Rest in Peace.

Because we sure as hell won't be able to.