Negotiators have been assigned by the
French presidency to unveil a new draft Friday morning of a climate
change text that is significantly slimmed down from the 50-page document
published on Thursday.
That is before they put forth an even
closer-to-final document by noon on Saturday. Although staff negotiators
have been hashing out the text since Sunday, foreign ministers,
including Secretary of State John Kerry, will arrive to start high-level
talks by this weekend. The new documents are intended to clear away the
clutter and set the stage for high-level negotiations.
But as the text becomes more streamlined,
the fault lines will become more stark: India and other poor countries
demand that the United States and the developed world agree to language
that would legally bind them to spending more public funds on clean
technology in the developing world. The United States demands aggressive
outside oversight of other countries’ emissions reductions. Those
fights will be at the heart of the talks, and they could determine how
the world responds to climate change in the future.
Still, the good will surrounding the
effort to reach a deal remains high. And although there is still a
chance that a wild card will block a final vote, observers think those
chances may be lower than usual — in part because these talks are
happening at this moment in this place.
The French have clearly invested an
enormous amount of political and personal capital in pursuit of a
climate change deal, and the shadow of last month’s terrorist attacks in
and around Paris continues to hang over the talks.
"I think any country that would go up
against France right now would be looked at so badly in the broader
political context,” said Jennifer Morgan, an expert in international
climate change negotiations for the World Resources Institute, a
research organization.
That means there is more appetite for
compromise than confrontation. Negotiators, pressing to reach a deal
quickly and pleasantly, may take many of the toughest issues out of the
text entirely.
One such candidate is deforestation, a
tricky and complicated subject that involves paying developing nations
like Brazil and Indonesia not to cut down trees for agriculture.
It is an important but contentious issue, and to pave the way forward for a deal, it may get eliminated altogether.
Observers are concerned that pushing to
deliver a quick, clean document could lead to the postponement of many
complicated but important legal processes, with a text saying the matter
would be clarified later.
Those legal processes are what will give
the deal teeth, and leaving them unresolved could weaken the deal. In
the eagerness to get a deal that everyone can agree on, said Alden
Meyer, the head of the Union of Concerned Scientists, "there is also a
fear that we are heading towards the lowest common denominator.”
(New York Times)