Summer Re-Run - Part III

A high-profile issue at the COP was to get countries to agree to no more than 1.5 degrees (celsius) warming. And to get the developed world, which is to say the USA, to pay for it.

An excerpt from my last full blog entry from Paris:

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 concurrent conversations. Everyone else relies on the ready standbys of rumour, speculation and making things up. For example, the Climate Action Network Press conference today was just silly. Speakers who clearly had no idea what they were talking about regaled the assembled crowd with vague allusions to "vested interests" and "blockers."

The only real information is what comes out after the negotiators send their proposed wording to the COP President. The President pulls it all together into a new draft agreement for everyone to talk about.

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

As a comparative novice in this field, but also someone who has worked with texts-telling-people-what-to-do for 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 it is brokered compromises the purpose of which is just to be in the document. No one will ever refer to these parts, but it was important to someone that they be included.

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 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 aspirational goals at the global level. But it is hardly the only thing."

With 80 people perished (at time of writing) in the Hawaii fires, and tens of thousands killed in last year's heat waves (the count's still going for this year), hot-tub temperature ocean waters, and more hectares of forest burned in Canada this year than the past ten years combined, in retrospect my expectation that Carney, Bloomberg and their ilk could help turn things around seems, well, pathetic.

Thanks for reading.

Karen

Gadgets will save us: a wind
power tree on the COP grounds