Rich Nations Block All Progress at U.N. Climate Talks

23/10/2021 02:55 Rich Nations Block All Progress at U.N.
Climate Talks
RICH NATIONS, AFTER

DRIVING CLIMATE DISASTER,
BLOCK ALL PROGRESS AT U.N.
TALKS
“They’ve effectively been lighting the house on fire as they
plan to walk out the door,” said an advocate about Trump’s
pledge to leave the Paris Agreement.
Kate Aronoff
December 18 2019, 3:26 p.m.
Empty chairs of the delegations are pictured during the U.N. Climate Change Conference COP25 in Madrid,
on Dec. 13, 2019. Photo: Cristina Quicler/AFP/Getty Images
Last Wednesday, over 300 demonstrators at COP25 in Madrid — this

year’s 14-day U.N. climate talks, the group’s longest ever — watched
https://theintercept.com/2019/12/18/un-climate-cop25/ 1/17
23/10/2021 02:55 Rich Nations Block All Progress at U.N. Climate Talks
from the courtyard of a conference center as a metal wall rose up

seemingly out of nowhere, locking civil society observers literally out
in the cold. Moments earlier, some had had their entry badges
snatched off them by U.N. guards in skirmishes outside the main ple-
nary hall before they were cordoned off. Security prevented them
from speaking even to the press; all civil society observers had been
barred from entering the conference center. With access to the venue
now blocked, protesters marched out the back entrance, where they
were greeted by Spanish police.
The protest was intended to call out the widespread lack of ambition
coming from some of the world’s biggest emitters of heat-trapping
greenhouse gasses, calling on countries in the “global north” to pro-
vide support for climate mitigation, adaptation, and recovery, plus
excise loopholes that would give polluters a way out to keep on with
business as usual. Demonstrators’ credentials were restored a few
hours later, but the talks had done little to address their concerns. By
Saturday afternoon — two days after talks were set to end — there
was little agreement as to what would come out of them. “There is no
one issue that is completely resolved,” Harjeet Singh, who leads up
global climate work for ActionAid, told me. By the end of the closing
plenary the next day, most major issues had been punted to future
meetings. Even U.N. Secretary General António Guterres expressed
his dissatisfaction on Twitter.
“There is no doubt: rich countries have been blocking progress across

the board,” Singh said.
On that front, not much has changed over the past decade. In 2009,
the Copenhagen climate talks collapsed when a small subset of pre-
dominantly wealthy countries presented a hastily compiled three-
page document that all but negated years of work by the developing
countries, demanding a decision with little time for debate. The latter
group refused.
This time around, a key sticking point was over how much the U.S.,
as the world’s largest historical emitter of fossil fuels, owes to the
rest of the world, as it prepares to leave the Paris Agreement. Many
countries in the “global south” will require financial and technical
assistance in order not just to develop decarbonized and resilient
economies but to deal with those climate impacts already happening
and likely to accelerate, which many argue should come at least in
part from wealthier nations. But does the U.S. agree? Not so much.
Climate activists protest at the U.N. Climate Change Conference COP25 in Madrid, on Dec. 11,
2019.
Photo: Cristina Quicler/AFP/Getty Images
At issue in Madrid and in the demonstration that provoked last

Wednesday’s lock-out is wealthy countries’ abdication of historical re-
sponsibility, both for the mess the planet now finds itself in and for
its crucial role in keeping things from getting infinitely worse. The
U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which officially gov-
erns the Paris Agreement, is clear on the “common but differentiated
responsibility” held by parties which are signed on to it. Wealthy
countries, that is, built their economies in large part through the
burning of fossil fuels. This development was also furnished by the

use of land, labor, and resources from what is today the less devel-
oped “global south,” including several dozen former colonial
holdings.
Cruelly, it’s those places

that are already being ham-
mered by the impacts of
If you ask me to climb
fossil-fueled development a mountain and I don’t
in the “global north”; cli- have the muscles to do
mate equity advocates ar-
gue that larger economies
that, you are asking
which have benefited from the impossible,”
historical processes like Palestinian
colonialism and slavery
Ambassador Amman
have the capacity to transi-
tion more quickly, and
Hijazi said.
should allow countries and
people that have traditionally been exploited the time and capacity
to catch up. Throughout Democratic and Republican administrations,
the United States’ team of career State Department negotiators have
spent years stymying calls for more ambitious climate policy, coming
most vocally from “global south” countries already experiencing the
climate emergency. Climate finance, in particular, has been their
bête noire.
“It’s clear that this is a bad deal because of the obstruction of the U.S.
and other Global North countries,” says Sriram Madhusoodanan,
deputy campaigns director for the watchdog group Corporate
Accountability International. “Throughout these talks they’ve effec-
tively been lighting the house on fire as they plan to walk out the
door,” referring to Donald Trump’s pledge to formally leave the Paris
Agreement as soon as he’s able to next year.
Who Will Shoulder the Weight?

Days before talks began, a report from the U.N. Environment
Program noted the gap between countries’ existing commitments un-
der the Paris Agreement (“Intended Nationally Determined
Contributions,” or INDCs) and what it will take to stay within the
“well below 2 degrees” Celsius threshold of warming its signatories
committed to. Existing INDCs will shoot temperatures up by 3.3 de-
grees, leaving major coastal cities and some whole nations underwa-
ter and collapsing crop yields worldwide. To get back on track for 1.5
degrees, per demands from the “global south,” global emissions need
to decline 7.6 percent each year between 2020 and 2030, 150 times
greater than the largest single emissions drop in world history: the
collapse of the Soviet Union. Every year. For a decade. “Common but
differentiated” — per the UNFCCC — has generally been interpreted
to mean this burden should be shared somewhat equitably.
“You can’t really think of fairness and equity as just another objective
that it would be nice to try and squeeze in if we can while we deal
with this fantastically crazy emergency. It’s actually something that
we have to deal with if we want to have any hope of dealing with the
climate emergency,” says Sivan Kartha, senior scientist with the
Stockholm Environment Institute’s U.S. office. “At the end of the day,
it’s a global problem that will require long-term cooperation across
vastly different countries and people in terms of their contribution to
the problem and their ability to deal with the problem. The only way
you can sustain that kind of cooperation is if folks feel like it is fair.”
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Original reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to
Asyou.
of now, many don’t. The U.S., often in league with other developed
countries, has long tried to sideline conversations about how much is
Email
owed “global south.” Alongside I’m
address
to the in ⟶ pressure on lawmak-
industry
ers in Congress, that dispute was a key factor in its refusal to imple-
By signing up, I agree to receive emails from The Intercept and to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
ment the Kyoto Protocol in 2001. That agreement (which still exists)
established a system by which developed, carbon-intensive countries
(also called “Annex I” countries) were charged with making emissions
cuts. Under the new “bottom-up” system built by the Paris
Agreement, all countries are required to make INDCs and ratchet up
those pledges every five years, through what’s known as a global
stocktake. The first of those will happen next year, and developing
nations have argued that they can’t raise their goals without concrete
support in funds, technology, and technical support from rich coun-
tries, a red-line issue for the U.S.
“We view ambition as a package, not as a one-way street. Ambition

needs to improve mitigation, adaptation and means of implementa-
tion. If you ask me to climb a mountain and I don’t have the muscles
to do that, you are asking the impossible,” Palestinian Ambassador
Ammar Hijazi, chair of the G77 and China group, said in a small press
briefing. “An electric car is still an expensive commodity,” he says by
way of example. “If I buy an electric car in Palestine, there are only 4
or 5 charging stations. Then I’m stuck with this car that doesn’t take
me anywhere.”
Further complicating this is the U.S.’s exit from the Paris Agreement,
a document designed in no small part to allay its concerns over
Kyoto, that it placed an undue burden on developed countries, a ma-
jor reason, along with industry pressure, why it refused to implement
that treaty in 2001. Hijazi reasons that its leaving Paris amounts to
“asking countries to carry the U.S. on their shoulders,” picking up its
slack for reducing emissions generated here that now “nobody is held
accountable for.”
He also fears the U.S. departure could have farther reaching repercus-
sions, and is “undermining the world order as we know it in terms of
multilateralism, in solving our problems in rooms instead of running
after each other in the streets,” he said. “This is where we shout and
scream at each other, but we try to find solutions. We don’t agree on
everything, but this is how the world functions. If you start with-
drawing from one multilateral treaty after another because you don’t
feel that it suits you, countries will feel weary about contributing to
this process.”
Floated as the “ambition COP” by the Chilean presidency team that

oversaw this year’s proceedings, these talks were partially intended
to clarify what raising ambition will mean in practice, impressing on
countries the need to up their pledges next year on the lead-up to
and after 2020. Going into this year’s COP, just 80 countries repre-
senting 10.5 percent of global emissions have committed to doing so,
though the European Union launched a new pledge on climate last
week that has already drawn criticism. While countries with targets
that stretch through 2025 will have to present new and improved
plans, those with plans through 2030 can simply “re-communicate”
their initial pledges. The U.S. only has a 2025 target but is scheduled
to exit the Paris agreement before COP26. All other big non-U.S. emit-
ters have 2030 targets, so can just present what they already have.
Read Our Complete Coverage

Climate Crimes
Congressional Democrats who visited COP25 in its first week, includ-

ing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were eager to distance themselves
from Trump and reiterated their commitment to Paris. Pelosi called

the climate crisis “the existential threat of our time,” noting the
U.S.’s “moral responsibility to help the world’s most vulnerable popu-
lations as we pass this planet on to future generations.” The next
week, she jammed through a trade deal (the United States-Mexico-
Canada Agreement) that doesn’t mention climate change and allows
the U.S. to expand the export of its emissions abroad, an agreement
Sierra Club trade expert Ben Beachy called “an unabashed handout to
Exxon and Chevron.”
One version of the text introduced by the Chilean presidency to sort

out this issue effectively scrapped any mention of ambition, sparking
outrage from civil society groups along with the High Ambition
Coalition, comprised of a mixture of developed and developing coun-
tries. The Paris rulebook now “re-emphasizes with serious concern
the urgent need to address the significant gap” between today’s
pledges and what’s needed, and “urges parties to consider” that gap
should they choose not to increase their ambition and double down
on existing INDCs. On Sunday morning, the U.S. joined other prolific
polluters in blocking a nonbinding resolution encouraging more am-
bitious targets.
“It seems like there’s been a complete disconnect,” Sara Shaw, inter-
national program coordinator for climate justice and energy at
Friends of the Earth International. At COP, she adds, there are “amaz-
ing presentations on the latest science, looking at how much the in-
ternational climate regime is going to need to reduce emissions, but
it doesn’t feel like it penetrates into the actual discussion. Instead of
being driven by science, you see a situation where negotiations are
really driven by self-interest and politics. It’s kind of a race to the bot-
tom. … If ordinary people knew what went on here, they’d be abso-
lutely horrified.”
Loss and Damage

Climate finance — broken down into mitigation, adaptation, and

“loss and damage” (funds for recovery from climate impacts already
happening) — has been one of the key North-South dividing lines
since UNFCCC talks began in the early 1990s. The U.S. has long in-
sisted that only mitigation and adaptation are worthy venues for
U.N.-coordinated funds, arguing that loss and damage should be han-
dled primarily either by national governments or aid groups like the
Red Cross. With the Warsaw International Mechanism — the pre-
Paris vehicle for overseeing loss and damage finance — up for review,
many saw this COP as an opportunity to resolve long-standing issues
on loss and damage and clarify how funds can be solicited and
distributed.
The U.S. saw a different

kind of opening. Back
A representative from when the Paris Agreement
Tuvalu said the United was being negotiated,
States’ continual push Republicans in Congress
to block financing for threatened to bring the

deal to a vote if it included
loss and damage anything like a binding
“could be considered a commitment. The compro-
crime against mise struck was a short

paragraph declaring “that
humanity.” Article 8 of the Agreement”
— the one that deals with
finance — “does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or
compensation.” Less than a year out from leaving Paris, U.S. negotia-
tors tried using a debate over WIM governance to extend that liability
waiver to the entirety of the UNFCCC, which it will remain a party to
after leaving Paris. This would undermine the ability of WIM to col-
lect funds and will effectively reset tallies on who is responsible for
global emissions. U.S. negotiators didn’t get their wish, but the issue
will be up for debate again next year. They also pushed back hard on
any “bifurcation” of responsibilities between developed and develop-
ing countries. On the last day of talks, a representative from Tuvalu

— among the most climate vulnerable countries on earth — said that
the United States’ continual push to block financing for loss and
damage “could be considered a crime against humanity.”
Climate vulnerable countries are already resorting to desperate mea-

sures to foot the bill for rising temperatures. Without another pool of
funds to draw on, Mozambique — already mired in debt to Credit
Suisse and Russia’s VTB Capital — was forced to take out an $118 mil-
lion IMF loan to recover from Cyclone Idai, which killed more than
1,000 people and caused billions of dollars worth of damage in April.
Widespread debt relief has been a key demand of groups pushing for
more equitable climate finance, but absent those changes and robust
loss and damage financing Mozambique and other countries may
well be pressured into complying with IMF demands on loan repay-
ment that could make mitigation, adaptation and recovery all the
more difficult.
There were some modest victories on the finance front in Madrid, in-
cluding the creation of an expert group on loss and damage, consen-
sus to establish a “Santiago Network” for coordination among coun-
tries on the issue, and the adoption of language urging “the scaling-
up of action and support” on loss and damage. Yet with lingering
questions about governance and no new commitments to deliver
funds, there’s still a long road ahead to any functional loss and dam-
age system.
“We need to understand that we are in a very desperate situation. We

have seen how inaction over the last 10 years is piling up pressure on
developing countries to deliver and carry the burden of developed
countries that kept dragging their feet,” Singh told The Intercept, re-
ferring to the U.S. “On finance, across the board they have weakened
the text and they don’t want anything substantive to go forward.”
California’s cap-and-trade program puts a price on carbon emitted by polluters, like the
Valero Benicia oil Refinery seen here on July 12, 2017, in Benicia, Calif. The program re-
quires companies to reduce their emissions or buy permits allowing them to continue to pol-
lute.
Photo: Rich Pedroncelli/AP
The Carbon Market

Though the U.S. will likely be out of the Paris Agreement by the time
lingering issues from COP25 are picked back up in Glasgow next year,
its continued membership in the UNFCCC will mean that it could still
continue to play a considerable role in the talks, including on fi-
nance. And the world’s biggest polluting companies, who aren’t go-
ing anywhere anytime soon, have been buzzing about this COP’s big-
gest ticket item, still unresolved: the Paris Agreement’s expansive
new carbon market.
Emissions trading systems like the one Article 6 of the Paris

Agreement outlines how countries can buy and trade credits from
others that have reduced their emissions already. When they can’t
meet reduction targets within their own borders, they can purchase
“offset” credits that theoretically correspond to emissions reductions
elsewhere. Just one piece of Article 6 — 6.8 — deals with nonmarket

mechanisms, and has yet to be fleshed out at much length. Barring
significant changes, carbon markets will remain the primary means
through which countries collaborate to reduce emissions.
Carbon trading has been

hugely controversial.
Pushed actively in the U.N.
“I will not blame the
by BP and the process,” Harjeet
Environmental Defense Singh of ActionAid
Fund in the 1990s — and in
the Paris Agreement at
said. “Some people
least partially at Shell’s urg- made sure this
ing — it has a questionable process didn’t deliver.”
track record for curbing
pollution. Critics argue that
it’s a danger to ecosystems, human rights, and Indigenous
sovereignty, with few if any upsides for the planet. Shortly after the
EU’s Emissions Trading System was set up in 2005, the price of car-
bon credits trading within it collapsed and remained low until 2017,
making it cheap to pollute. The East Coast’s RGGI system is mostly a
means of raising revenue — not reducing emissions — and recent re-
porting from ProPublica shows that emissions from sectors covered
by California’s cap-and-trade system have risen since its implementa-
tion in 2010. The Kyoto Protocol included a carbon trading system
known as the Clean Development Mechanism that has been marred
by scandal, wherein companies could sell credits for producing and
destroying emissions they wouldn’t have produced otherwise.
Industry groups as well as countries like Australia, India, and Brazil

are now fighting to carry credits from the Kyoto system into the Paris
Agreement’s Article 6 implementation, allowing them to count al-
ready existing credits — accounting for more than the annual emis-
sions of the EU — toward their emissions reductions.
Meanwhile, many Indigenous advocates and civil society groups have

argued that carbon markets should be scrapped altogether, and are
little more than money-making schemes for the worst polluters. Both
critics of carbon trading and those more friendly to market mecha-
nisms have pushed for the inclusion of more stringent environmental
and human rights standards in the text governing its implementa-
tion. They also want to prevent double counting, whereby the pur-
chaser of offset credits and the country where the project takes place
can each count the reductions it produces. Brazil, other countries
with right-wing governments, and lots of offset projects have fought
such reforms.
Fossil fuel interests are looking to make sure they get a good deal out
of Article 6, too. The UNFCCC has never established a conflict of in-
terest policy, and industry representatives active on that and other
issues — on observer badges like the ones given to civil society repre-
sentatives — enjoy broad access to countries’ negotiating teams, with
trade associations like the International Emissions Trading
Association hosting happy hours and back-to-back events at the
“Business Hub” pavilions it’s mounted for the last several years.
IETA’s delegation to this year’s talks was larger than the one sent by
the EU, with 140 delegates.
“I will not blame the process,” Singh, of ActionAid, says. “Some peo-
ple made sure this process didn’t deliver. They have just been looking
at their own vested interest and protecting their corporations. We do
not have any alternate to this process. It’s the blocking and obstruct-
ing that is not allowing all vulnerable countries to have an equal say
and space.”
The argument from industry and allied countries, Madhusoodanan

said, is that, “‘We cannot effectively implement the Paris Agreement
unless we have business along with us every step of the way.’ And
that’s fundamentally antithetical to the idea that some of these cor-
porations are here to advance very specific interests toward their
profits. … By the time decisions get to negotiations that observers

can be there for, there’s already been a lot coordination that’s hap-
pened behind closed doors with these very powerful entities that
serves to advance a pro-corporate agenda.”
The open arms with which corporations are welcomed stands in stark
contrast to the treatment of civil society this year, who, beyond being
exiled en masse on Wednesday, had their daily newsletters banned
from circulation at the start of the COP, with the UNFCCC placing re-
strictions on how many sheets of paper NGOs were allowed to print.
The talks relocation from Chile to Spain — a call made amid wide-
spread protests against Sebastián Piñera’s neoliberal government
there — mounted further barriers to participation.
Bert De Wel, climate policy director for the International Trade Union
Congress, says several union members who planned to join the ITUC
delegation — including many from Latin America — were forced to
stay home owing to travel costs and other difficulties. “Especially the
people that follow policy work on the ground in the unions tend to
fall out,” he says. “The bosses and leaders will find subsidies and
sponsorship to get there, but to have a workflow representation of
people that are much closer to that level of our work becomes much
more complicated. … We cannot afford fancy side events or
pavilions.”
Over the weekend, developing country representatives were kept out

of late night backroom negotiations where final texts were being dis-
cussed. And on the last day, the final plenary was delayed because the
UNFCCC wasn’t sure they had the two-thirds quorum required to
move forward. Several representatives from developing nations
lacked the funds to change their flights.
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23/10/2021 02:55 Rich Nations Block All Progress at U.N.

RICH NATIONS, AFTER

December 18 2019, 3:26 p.m.

Last Wednesday, over 300 demonstrators at COP25 in Madrid — this

from the courtyard of a conference center as a metal wall rose up

“There is no doubt: rich countries have been blocking progress across

At issue in Madrid and in the demonstration that provoked last

burning of fossil fuels. This development was also furnished by the

Cruelly, it’s those places

Who Will Shoulder the Weight?

Join Our Newsletter

“We view ambition as a package, not as a one-way street. Ambition

Floated as the “ambition COP” by the Chilean presidency team that

Read Our Complete Coverage

Congressional Democrats who visited COP25 in its first week, includ-

from Trump and reiterated their commitment to Paris. Pelosi called

One version of the text introduced by the Chilean presidency to sort

Loss and Damage

Climate finance — broken down into mitigation, adaptation, and

The U.S. saw a different

to block financing for threatened to bring the

crime against mise struck was a short

ing countries. On the last day of talks, a representative from Tuvalu

Climate vulnerable countries are already resorting to desperate mea-

“We need to understand that we are in a very desperate situation. We

The Carbon Market

Emissions trading systems like the one Article 6 of the Paris

elsewhere. Just one piece of Article 6 — 6.8 — deals with nonmarket

Carbon trading has been

Industry groups as well as countries like Australia, India, and Brazil

Meanwhile, many Indigenous advocates and civil society groups have

The argument from industry and allied countries, Madhusoodanan

profits. … By the time decisions get to negotiations that observers

Over the weekend, developing country representatives were kept out

The kind of reporting we do is essential to democracy, but it is not easy, cheap,

Under Left- and Right-Wing Leaders, the Amazon Has Burned.

Shell Oil Executive Boasts That His Company Influenced the

How the Fossil Fuel Industry Is Attempting to Buy the Global

Can Extinction Rebellion Build a U.S. Climate Movement Big

Palestinian Rights Groups That

Israel designated six leading Palestinian

Private Prison Companies Pursue

The administration should “enforce its

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema Is the Dying

Sinema’s subservience to big moneyed

© FIRST LOOK INSTITUTE. ALL RIGHTS RESE RVED

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