Paris - Day Eleven

I'm cheating a bit, writing this on day twelve, but I had a night out with my colleagues yesterday and it was too late to blog when I got back to my room.

What a difference a day makes. On Day 10, Wednesday December 9, there must have been 40,000 people on the COP venue. The crowds were oppressive. There was no place to sit. The line ups at the food outlets stretched out into the aisles. You don't want to know about the toilettes.

And then, as if someone threw a switch, on Thursday December 10, the place was half deserted. In the morning I attended a side event featuring the climate change celebrity Sir Nicholas Stern. I got there early because I was certain the place would be crammed.

Nope.

Barely a quarter full.

There was a sizeable crowd on Thursday at the daily Environment and Climate Change Canada mid-day briefing on the negotiations. The fellow chairing the briefing said this would likely be the last one because the negotiations were growing more intense. There were no more meetings that people could sit in on and hear for themselves how things were going, just focused one-on-ones and drafting meetings that don't work all that well with curious onlookers.

It's my role here to gather information about the negotiations and send that back home, but without being able to attend meetings, I've got no source of information. So, I checked out some press conferences to see if anyone not a negotiator knew any more than I did. The Climate Action Network, for example, holds a daily news conference.

Here's the thing about COPs. When the negotiations get real, no one but the negotiators knows what's going on, and even they have a hard time because there are so many different concurrent conversations. Everyone else relies on the ready standbys of rumour, speculation and making things up. The Climate Action Network Press conference was just silly.  Speakers who clearly had no idea what they were talking about regaled the crowd with vague allusions to "vested interests" and "blockers."

The only real information anymore is what comes out when the negotiators have stopped talking and submit proposed wording to the COP President. The President, in his turn, pulls it all together into a new draft agreement for everyone to talk about some more.

A new text came out late in the day yesterday. I looked it over after I got to my room last night.

As a complete neophyte with hardly any experience in this field, but someone who has worked with texts-telling-people-what-to-do for the past thirty years, I think the new document is pretty good.

There are three or four parts of the document that really matter. The rest of the words are brokered compromises the purpose of which is just to be included in the document.

No one will ever refer to these parts of the agreement again, but, as part of the negotiations, it was very important to someone that they be there.

There's another thing about the climate deal and what it means. I shared these thoughts with my counterpart from the Yukon who needed a quick catch up because she'd been holed up in her hotel room for two days with the flu.

"There's two parts to the COP. There's the hard work of reaching global consensus through the negotiations, and then there's all the stuff that we learn about around the negotiations.

"I listen to people like Mark Carney and Mike Bloomberg say companies are going to have to share information with their shareholders about their climate risks; I hear stories about entrepreneurs bringing solar energy systems to a billion people in Africa; there are billions of dollars of private money being invested in new technology that will fuel the economy without throwing a whole bunch of carbon into the atmosphere.

"The climate deal is important because it sets some high-level rules at the global level. But it is hardly the only thing. Global greenhouse emissions have remained flat while the economy grew for the past two years. It's not a trend, but it's a sign of hope."

Because people expect me to do these things, I have "predicted" (which is to say guessed) that there will definitely be a climate deal, and it will leave everyone a little unhappy, and it won't be done until Sunday (their deadline is noon today).

Based on the new text, I'll upgrade my guess to say they'll be done by midnight Paris time tonight with a big meeting of the Parties tomorrow to celebrate.

Then they can get some sleep.