Climate agreement drafted in France

United Nations negotiators announce they have adopted a draft deal to fight climate change.

But if the U.S. is to come on board, this is what its domestic politics demands, and in the end everyone will bow to the inevitable.

Another issue that will need to be resolved is how to verify and measure whether countries are living up to their commitments.

“We would have wished to be further along than we are at this point, but the text being forwarded so far reflects our key priorities”, said Maldives delegate Thoriq Ibrahim, who chairs an alliance of small island nations on the front lines of climate change. Most relate to how to define the obligations of countries in different stages of development in fighting climate change.

The OECD said it had sought to provide a robust methodology, but cautioned that projecting how much global climate money would be available by 2020 from a plethora of grants and loans, some public and some private, was complex. He believes that if India moves, the developed nations will also have to move and our planet will become a safer place to live.

The fifth assessment report of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has clearly put out the number on the amount of carbon dioxide the world can emit while maintaining the safety threshold of a temperature increase of less than 2 degrees Celsius since the pre-industrial era. “There is still hope for an ambitious deal to be reached, but there is also risk that countries will race to the bottom, which the French presidency has to prevent”, said Li Shuo, Greenpeace China’s climate and energy campaigner. Yet it was significantly slimmed down to just 21 pages against a 300-page document debated in Copenhagen at COP15 in 2009. India would do well to not oppose the 1.5 degree limit outright; rather, we should say that both 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees should be kept as targets, as done in previous climate conferences.

Negotiators from 195 nations delivered a blueprint Saturday for a pact to secure humanity from the consequences of rampant emissions of climate-altering greenhouse gases.

The text which was amended during the first week of the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) is still a tough nut to crack with more brackets that wording.

The Secretary-General, joined by groups such as the World Bank, the Global Environment Facility and the Compact of Mayors, and individuals including Michael Bloomberg – the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change – will co-sponsor a “Climate Action 2016” summit of leaders from government, business, cities and localities, civil society and academia on May 5 and 6 May in Washington, DC.

China’s chief climate negotiator, Su Wei, said: “It has laid a solid foundation for next week … like when we cook a meal you need to have all the seasonings and ingredients and recipes, but next week is the actual cooking”.

“We have to further discuss… try to find some proper solution”, he said.

And the issue of a review and ratchet mechanism, which would see countries revisit pledges they have already made to cut their greenhouse gases up to 2030, and potentially improve on them, also needs to be decided. Republican lawmakers are staunchly refusing to approve any sort of binding agreement that comes out of the Paris talks and have recently passed two bills aimed at gutting President Obama’s carbon-emission cutbacks. “There’s no doubt about that”.

Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island, says “the fossil fuel industry is doing its best to manipulate American politics” but that won’t deter the success of a pact to fight climate change which is being hammered out in Paris.

A pillar of the Paris agreement is a list of voluntary national pledges for reducing emissions from burning coal, oil and gas.

PARIS Developed nations have mobilized some $80-$90 billion per year to help the poorest survive a warmer world, delegates at Paris climate talks said, but emerging countries dispute the figures and say a goal of $100 billion by 2020 is far from reach. Some nations want a commitment to phase out fossil fuels by the middle of the century; others see that as unrealistic.