Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
12/18/2015
Back home after weeks in France, key administration officials this week offered their views on the negotiating process leading up to the recently adopted Paris Agreement, the first universal legally binding climate deal in history. The agreement was finalized Dec. 12 at the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and is the first such accord to apply to developing as well as developed nations.
The core of the agreement is based on nationally determined contributions (NDCs), public commitments developed by each of the nearly 200 member states to the UNFCCC. These contributions lay out goals and actions each country will pursue. The commitments themselves are not legally binding, but the framework in which they exist is. This framework includes a review system that requires countries to come back to the table every five years and re-evaluate their NDCs, increasing the ambition during each review cycle.
Agreement Will Not Meet Stated Goal
The need for such a review system stems from the simple fact the total results of the NDCs will not meet the agreement’s goal to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius and pursue efforts to reach a 1.5-degree trajectory.
The current NDCs would put the world on a trajectory to average global warming of 2.7 degrees by the end of the century. The failure of the NDCs to hit a 1.5 or even 2-degree goal is no surprise, Todd Stern, State Department special envoy for climate change, said this week at an event hosted by the Center for American Progress. “Nobody in their wildest dreams thought they would,” he said.
Brian Deese, senior climate adviser to President Barack Obama, echoed this sentiment at an event hosted by the New Republic this week. “We knew on the front end of Paris that the 186, now 188, [Intended] NDCs submitted were not sufficient to get to below the 2-degree threshold,” he said, going on to note that “it would be a mistake, a significant mistake, to diminish the degree to which they will change the trajectory of CO2 emissions and climate.” On a business as usual pathway, global temperature rise would reach nearly 4 degrees Celsius.
Future Implications of Deal Considered
While the NDCs are a good jumping-off point, the deal’s real momentum may be driven by the strong market signal it sends, Deese suggested. “I think this agreement is going to have a profound impact on private investment and as a result on the cost of deployable technologies,” he said.
Deese suggested the agreement is a clear indicator the world is ready to move beyond current high emitting and inefficient technologies and that it will result in increased innovation in low-carbon, sustainable technologies. These technologies will get off the ground faster, and their costs will be driven down faster with assistance from increased private investment, he said.
Politically, the deal may strengthen the case for carbon prices as a means to lower emissions. Economists have long agreed upon pricing carbon as the most efficient way to combat climate change. “Obviously, the president tried to get a real price on carbon back in [2009], with regard to cap and trade legislation, but that, you know, some day that’s going to happen,” Stern said, referencing the failed Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill of 2009.
The Agreement That Almost Never Was
The U.S. negotiating team had several “wins” in the talks, including the inclusion of a transparency protocol holding both developed and developing nations to essentially the same standards for reporting progress in meeting their commitments. However, in the final hours of negotiations, the deal was nearly torpedoed by a typo. In order for the U.S. to sign onto the deal the targets laid out in the NDCs could not be legally binding. If they were, the administration would be required to send the agreement to the Senate for ratification, which is extremely unlikely with Republicans in control of both houses of Congress.
All parties involved understood this, Stern said, which is why it came as a shock to the U.S. negotiating team when the final text arrived with some legally binding language that had not been seen before. An article of the text stated that developed nations “shall” develop economy-wide emissions reduction targets. “I was actually the one who saw in Article 4, Paragraph 4, this word ‘shall’ that wasn’t supposed to be there. It was supposed to be a ‘should’ but it said ‘shall. It was a paragraph that we had worked on very carefully and we had worked on in concert with the French,” Stern said, explaining that the world “shall” would indicate legally binding targets.
The team experienced a wave of panic, as the typo could have led to greater problems moving forward, derailing the negotiations. “There are a fair number of difficult countries. … And so, for some of those negotiators, whether it was a mistake or not a mistake, it was there, it was an opportunity,” he said. The fear was that these countries could use the typo as a bargaining chip to try to get things they had been denied to that point, Stern said. “And that would have unraveled the whole thing, because you wouldn’t have been able to stop that.”
Luckily, the U.S. was able to work with allies, including China, to make a fix. During a plenary session later that night, COP President Laurent Fabius worked the correction into a laundry list of technical corrections, such as the addition or removal of a comma here or there, and then approved the measure before any country had a chance to challenge it. Shortly after, the agreement was adopted.
However, given that the “shall” had never appeared in any version of the text before, it remains unclear where it came from or why. “It is a very interesting mystery as to what happened because somebody, somewhere in the French or secretariat system, decided to do that,” Stern said. “You don’t auto correct from ‘should’ to ‘shall.’”
