EXCERPT - Landing the Paris Climate Agreement by Todd Stern

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Introduction

The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change was the most important international agreement of the young century and one of the most significant of the past hundred years. It addresses a growing threat that Barack Obama, at a 2015 meeting of business leaders, described as “the only issue other than nuclear weapons that has the capacity to alter the course of human progress.” It was a stirring success after twenty years of failed efforts to produce a strong, operational climate agreement. It embodied hope because it makes possible the prospect of transforming the global energy system at something like the speed and scale needed. And it was hard-­won given that there are some 195 countries in the UN climate body arrayed in a wide variety of groups, each with their own often conflicting agendas, the substance and politics of climate change are extraordinarily complicated, long-­standing North-­South resentments aggravate and sometimes paralyze the debate, and negotiations are governed by what amounts to a consensus rule of procedure, requiring that all countries, or nearly all, approve a new agreement.

The success of the Paris negotiation also radiated out beyond climate change. It sent a message about multilateralism itself, about the possibility of solving difficult global problems through common effort, a message of singular importance in a world where most of our greatest challenges are collective action problems. Speaking from the White House on the day the Paris Agreement was adopted, Obama captured this broader message when he said that “together we’ve shown what’s possible when the world stands as one.”1 And this aspect of the Paris Agreement is even more relevant now than it was in 2015, with the impulse toward constructive globalization facing strong headwinds.

The new agreement, reached on December 12, immediately changed the game on climate change, infusing it with a new level of importance, sending

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a signal around the world to governments, boardrooms, and civil society that climate now commanded the attention of world leaders, who had at last come together to address it. Al Gore, a leading political voice on climate change since the late 1980s, praised “this universal and ambitious agreement,” declaring that the transformation to a global clean energy economy “is now firmly and inevitably underway.”2 Michael Levi, the astute climate analyst for the Council on Foreign Relations, noted that “the world finally has a framework for cooperating on climate change that’s suited to the task.”3 Of course, there were critics as well, mostly focusing on the nonlegally binding nature of emission commitments, but what the critics wanted was undoable. Diplomacy, as much as domestic politics, is the art of the possible. That understanding is built into the Paris Agreement, but so is the commitment to building a strong and ambitious regime equal to the task. *

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The Paris Agreement was built on layers of negotiations that came before, so let’s take a step back to set the stage. The original climate treaty was the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), concluded in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio De Janeiro. The US Senate approved the treaty without controversy on October 7, 1992, toward the end of the first president Bush’s administration. The Convention defined its “ultimate objective” as “prevent[ing] dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” and outlined the major steps countries needed to take, including reducing their emissions (mitigation), reporting on their efforts to do that as well as on emission inventories (transparency), building resilience against the impacts of climate change (adaptation), and for developed countries, providing financial and technology support to developing countries. It called on all countries to limit their emissions but did not impose specific obligations, although it articulated a nonbinding aim for developed countries to return their emissions in 2000 to their 1990 levels. Importantly, it also divided the world into two broad categories—­ Annex 1 for developed countries, and non-­A nnex 1 for developing, based largely on their material circumstances in 1992. And it set forth a principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” (CBDR/RC, or just CBDR in climate jargon), indicating that countries have a common responsibility to act, but that responsibilities and capabilities are not equal.

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This principle of differentiation was critical for developing countries, who worried that requirements to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions could disrupt their priorities for growth, development, and the eradication of poverty. Such emissions, after all, are generated by activities crucial to the operation of modern economies—­burning fossil fuels to produce electricity, power all forms of transport, heat and cool buildings and homes, and help produce heavy industrial goods, and using land for agriculture and forestry.

Moreover, many developing countries saw themselves as getting a raw deal.

In their view, developed countries had grown rich on the strength of unfettered access to cheap fossil fuels without worrying about limits on greenhouse gases, so, as a matter of equity, those countries should bear the burden of solving the problem they caused and contribute funds to pay for the costs of developing country efforts to limit emissions and build resilience.

In 1995, the first Conference of the Parties (COP 1) to the Convention was held. Recognizing that the Framework Convention itself could not generate sufficient action to meet its core objective, the parties adopted the “Berlin Mandate” calling for a new agreement by the COP in 1997. That agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, was delivered at COP 3 in Kyoto. For the period 2008–­2012, the protocol required that developed countries undertake specific, legally binding obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and follow a set of rigorous rules to track compliance, but, following the explicit dictate of the Berlin Mandate, exempted developing countries from any new commitments. In effect, Kyoto deepened the Framework Convention’s division between developed and developing countries, establishing what came to be known as a firewall between them.

But this approach was untenable for two reasons. The first involved the basic math of global emissions. There was no way to meet the Convention’s ultimate objective—­avoiding dangerous climate change—­without significant participation by developing countries since their share of global emissions was already over 50 percent in 1997 and growing rapidly toward 60 percent by 2010.4 And that share was growing as a percentage of modern emissions, which dwarfed emissions produced long ago—more than half of all global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions since 1750 were emitted between 1990 and 2020.5 The second reason concerned politics because the firewall made Kyoto a political dead letter in the United States, where opponents labeled the exemption for developing countries, including China and other majors, as unfair. The famous Byrd-­Hagel Resolution in July 1997, which

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declared that the United States should not sign onto a treaty committing developed countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions unless it also called for specific commitments from developing countries, passed the Senate 95–­0. So although the United States agreed to the final text in Kyoto, it was never able to join the agreement. Given the carbon footprint of the United States both in 1997 and historically as well as our power and influence, the Kyoto Protocol was effectively doomed from the start. In June 2001, the second president Bush unceremoniously took the United States out of the Kyoto process altogether. With the United States and all developing countries on the sidelines, the protocol covered less than 25 percent of global emissions.6 In light of that reality, countries at the 2007 COP in Bali, Indonesia, adopted the “Bali Action Plan,” calling for a new agreement in 2009 covering all countries. That negotiation had been going on for a year when the Obama administration took office on January 20, 2009, and was supposed to conclude in Copenhagen less than eleven months later. Although no one knew it then, the fraught negotiation that lay ahead that year would become the first in a seven-­year struggle that culminated in Paris. *

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When the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015, it broke new ground. It was universal, casting aside the old paradigm in which obligations only applied to developed countries. It articulated strong goals to limit both global temperature and global greenhouse gas emissions. It established twin, staggered, five-­year cycles so that it would be constantly renewed, with one cycle for individual countries to ratchet up their emission targets, and another to take stock of how the world in the aggregate is doing on reducing emissions in light of the latest science. It instituted a transparency system for countries to report on their progress and for those reports to be reviewed by international experts. The agreement differentiated between developed and developing countries in a new manner, not based on the old firewall. It also adopted a hybrid legal form, with nonbinding emission targets but binding procedural rules. And it called for the mobilization of finance to assist poor countries with their climate needs. *

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The years since the agreement was reached have been years of consequence.

The United States and China, whose collaboration was pivotal to delivering

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the Paris Agreement, officially joined the agreement together on September 3 in Hangzhou, China, when Presidents Obama and Xi Jinping presented the relevant formal instruments to UN secretary-­ general Ban Ki-­ moon, and the agreement entered into force in near record time on November 4, thirty days after fifty-­five countries accounting for at least 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions had officially joined. But four days later, on November 8, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.

On June 1, 2017, Trump announced his plan to withdraw the United States from the agreement in a fact-­free Rose Garden speech. The reaction around the world and at home was swift and emphatic. European leaders issued an immediate statement declaring that the Paris Agreement was irreversible. China made it clear that it would stay in the agreement with or without the United States. Within days, a new US coalition called We Are Still In circulated a declaration of support for the Paris Agreement signed by more than 3,900 CEOs, mayors, governors, and college presidents, among others. The next month, Governor Jerry Brown of California and former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg launched a new effort called America’s Pledge to analyze and report on actions by states, cities, the private sector, and others to reduce emissions and bring the United States as close as possible to its 2025 Paris emissions target. In June, twenty-­four state governors formed the US Climate Alliance, led by Brown, Jay Inslee (state of Washington) and Andrew Cuomo (New York).

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations’ science body, continued to issue important reports underscoring the urgency of action, extreme weather events became still more extreme with each passing year, and greenhouse gas emissions kept rising despite the urgent need for them to peak and start declining. At the same time, the clean-­tech story got better and better, with technology like wind and solar energy becoming dramatically cheaper and spreading dramatically faster than most anyone even dreamed of, much less predicted. Electric vehicles (EVs) and the batteries required both for those vehicles and to provide storage capacity for power plants using renewable energy started racing up the same exponential curve.7 And a burgeoning world of innovation started booming to develop technologies that we need but don’t yet have. Yet there continue to be obstacles in our path—­powerful resistance from the global fossil fuel industry, complicated geopolitics, and the realities of human nature. Our capacity to overcome these hurdles quickly enough will make all the difference.

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This book is about the struggle of the international community to negotiate the kind of agreement essential to meeting the challenge of climate change.

Containing climate change requires action on many fronts. Nations, states, and cities need to enact laws and regulations aimed at spurring the shift to clean energy, protecting our “natural capital,” and removing greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural production. The work of research scientists, innovative companies, and civil society is vitally important as well. But because climate change is a quintessentially global threat—­the greenhouse gases released anywhere affect us everywhere—­you can’t contain it without sustained international engagement, and the Paris Agreement is the vehicle for that engagement. The book is also about the people and relationships that made the Paris Agreement happen, about negotiators and ministers who made a difference and often became my friends, from China, India, Brazil, Europe, Colombia, South Africa, New Zealand, the Marshall Islands, and all over the world. And it’s about the practice of diplomacy in pursuit of a mission.

The agreement, of course, is far from perfect, and we are not yet collectively doing what is necessary to conquer the threat. In the final chapter of the book, I’ll discuss some of the reasons for that as well as steps that can make the Paris regime work more effectively. But without Paris, the global effort to contain climate change would be adrift.

Barack Obama had it right on the day the Paris Agreement was adopted when he said that it “represents the best chance we have to save the one planet we’ve got.”8 He used the same motif not long after when he visited the State Department to thank my team for our work, signing a copy of the agreement’s first page: “To the Paris Team—­You’ve given future generations a fighting chance!” He had it right because there is no sure thing for a challenge like climate change, requiring a rapid, precedent-­setting transformation of the global economy. Paris doesn’t guarantee success because it cannot, but it gives us a structure, it gives us goals, it gives us rules, it makes demands, it brings us together, and it helps to build norms and expectations in the global public square. It gives us a chance.

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Notes Introduction 1. Joby Warrick and Chris Mooney, “196 Countries Approve Historic Climate Agreement,” Washington Post, December 12, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com /news/energy-environment/wp/2015/12/12/proposed-historic-climate-pact-nears -final-vote.

2. Suzanne Goldenberg et al., “Paris Climate Deal: Nearly 200 Nations Sign in End of Fossil Fuel Era,” Guardian, December 12, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com /environment/2015/dec/12/paris-climate-deal-200-nations-sign-finish-fossil-fuel-era.

3. Coral Davenport, “Nations Approve Landmark Climate Accord in Paris,” New York Times, December 12, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/world/europe /climate-change-accord-paris.html.

4. “Historical GHG Emissions,” Climate Watch, 2022, https://www.climatewatchdata .org/ghg-emissions?breakBy=regions&end_year=2020&regions=WORLD%2COECD &start_year=1990.

5. Thorfinn Stainforth and Bartosz Brzezinski, “More than Half of All CO2 Emissions since 1751 Emitted in the Last 30 Years,” Institute for European Environmental Policy, April 29, 2020, https://ieep.eu/news/more-than-half-of-all-co2-emissions-since-1751 6. Daniel Bodansky, Jutta Brunnée, and Lavanya Rajamani, International Climate Change Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 108.

7. “The adoption rate of innovations is nonlinear; it is slow at first, then rapidly rises before flattening out again as it reaches market saturation. Such trajectories of growth are commonly known as S-curve. The rapidly rising part of the S-curve is often underestimated in projections and expectations of new technologies. This is exactly what has happened with wind, batteries, and solar technologies in the past decade, with prices dropping faster and further than many believed possible.”

Laurens Speelman and Yuki Numata, A Theory of Rapid Transition: How S-Curves Work and What We Can Do to Accelerate Them (Basalt, CO: RMI, October 2022), 1, https:// rmi.org/insight/harnessing-the-power-of-s-curves.

8. John D. Sutter, Joshua Berlinger, and Ralph Ellis, “Obama: Climate Agreement ‘Best Chance We Have’ to Save the Planet,” CNN, December 14, 2015, https://www .cnn.com/2015/12/12/world/global-climate-change-conference-vote/index.html.

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