COP24 - sixth in a series - the Big Bad Wolf starts to blow

kiligirl (66)in #cop24 • 6 years ago

After a brief hiatus on writing this series to attend a Christmas concert, I'm back to keep giving you what we might not want to call highlights of the 24th global Conference of the Parties (COP, where Parties are countries to you and me) on climate change being hosted in Katowice, Poland, in the heart of coal country. You can find a list of previous posts on this topic at the end of this post.

Where are the negotiations going?

If you remember from previous posts, the main reason for this conference is to negotiate a so-called "rulebook" for implementation of the Paris Agreement. This presupposes that the Parties agree to the basic premise of the Paris Agreement, that the Earth is warming alarmingly quickly as a result of human activity, and in order to avoid the consequences, we need a global consensus on action which will limit the extent of warming to 2°C above pre-Industrial era levels, and if we can all get it together, try to beat that and keep it to 1.5°C.

A stick in the spokes of the negotiations wheel

Most of the participants had agreed to "welcome" the landmark report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which essentially provides the basis for having climate negotiations in the first place. But four major oil and gas (and coal) producers, the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, refused to "welcome" the report.

This is big stuff in the diplomatic world.

Instead of "welcoming" the report, they insisted that it would be enough for delegates to "take note" of the report, effectively kicking any climate action down the road.

The non-"welcoming" "note takers", the US, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Russia

It looks like the leadership of the conference might not be taking this lying down, according to Euractiv, who have been reporting on this daily.

“This is indeed disappointing and a very bad signal but definitely not the end of the story,” said Lola Vallejo, climate programme director at French think tank IDDRI. “This decision is putting pressure on the Polish presidency which until now chose not to focus on climate ambition,” she told EURACTIV.

David Levaï, who leads IDDRI’s activities on international cooperation for climate action, recalled that the 1.5°C IPCC report has been adopted by all parties, including the four countries opposed to welcoming it.

So they've adopted it, but they don't welcome it, they just want to "take note" of the report's conclusions.

I wonder how Greta Thunberg is taking this news. The clear-thinking fifteen year old might say those four countries are acting in their own selfish interest, perhaps even childishly...but I wouldn't want to put words in her decidely leaderly mouth.

Further progress on the rulebook

On the bright side, apparently delegates have managed to whittle down the number of negotiating options and are giving it more clarity.

The two focus areas for the upcoming week are:

transparency - agreeing a process for monitoring, reporting and verification (does anyone else hear an obvious case for blockchain here?)
finance.

One of the highlights on finance was that 415 institutional investors representing some $32 trillion in assets issued a statement of support for the Paris Agreement and a call to action to other investors. Now the denialists may call the capabilities of the world's best climate scientists into question, but are they really going to question the holders of the purse strings? Asking for a friend.

Protest at an American side event promoting clean coal

A side event on clean coal hosted by the American government was the target of organised protests yesterday. Check out the crowd's reaction to this official from the US Energy administration trying to put forth the argument that fossil fuels have a role to play in addressing climate change in this video from the Guardian.

"Keep it in the ground! Keep it in the ground!" they chanted.

The Independent reported unequivocally on the protest.

“It’s ludicrous for Trump officials to claim that they want to clean up fossil fuels, while dismantling standards that would do just that,” said Dan Lashof, director of the World Resources Institute.

“Since taking office, this administration has proposed to roll back measures to cut methane leaks from oil and gas operations, made it easier for companies to dump coal ash into drinking water, and just days ago proposed easing carbon pollution rules for new coal-fired power plants.