Monthly Archive: June 2013

With less than 5 months until COP19, there is much homework for Parties to do on specific proposals for the nature and structure of the 2015 deal. By Warsaw, Parties need to broadly be able to answer the 5 Ws (who, what, where, when, why and how) for all elements of the deal. Take mitigation for example.

Who – well that’s easy – all Parties.

What – binding mitigation commitments that respect Parties’ common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities in a dynamic manner, and long term global temperature and reduction targets that provide a strong signal to the investment community that fossil fuels are done!

Where – in a Protocol.

When – for the 5 year commitment period of 2021-2025.

Why – to save your gluteus maximus (and the planet).

How – ECO really hopes the answer to this question is obvious considering how much airtime Parties have been giving to CAN’s Equity Reference Framework these past two weeks.

Hummm…upon reflection, perhaps the homework is not that challenging, as all that is needed is to flesh out the “what” to be committed. This should ensure that Parties have enough clarity on the nature of commitments to be able to table initial offers by the Ban-Ki Moon Summit in the autumn of 2014.
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ECO is anxiously awaiting New Zealand’s expected pledge by Warsaw. With that in mind, it seemed timely to revisit an article from last year’s “CAN Collectibles” series on countries that can increase their ambition:

Countries That Can Increase Their Ambition

New Zealand 

National term of endearment/greeting: Bro/Mate

Annual alcohol consumption: 9.6 litres per person per year

Annual cheese consumption: 5.7 kilograms per person per year

Best things about New Zealand: Beautiful environment – some of it still unspoiled. Maori Culture. Wine

Worst things about New Zealand: Wanting to be Australia. Addiction to cars. Pathological need to spoil the unspoiled bits

Things you didn’t know: New Zealand isn’t all clean and green. New Zealand is the first country in the world to catalogue its entire known living and fossil life from 530 million years ago to today

Existing Unconditional pledge on the table: It’s all conditional, which means the unconditional pledge is to do nothing

Existing Conditional pledge (upper end): 10-20% reduction in net emissions below 1990 gross emissions levels by 2020

Next step to increase ambition by COP18: This year: Submit a meaningful QELRO that would require a 40% reduction by 2020, produce a low carbon development plan, tell us when gross emissions will peak, listen to the voices of progressive business leaders and agricultural scientists who can help us get there rather than the usual head-in-the-sand lobby groups, and get a new attitude

Rationale: Untapped low cost abatement opportunities.
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As the road to the 2015 agreement is beginning to be paved brick by brick, ECO wants to help Parties by giving them a direction in which this road should be built. Parties will be making submissions around how to further develop and operationalise the ADP work program. Here are a few questions that Parties should address in their submissions, which will help us to get closer to a fair, ambitious and binding deal.

Equity

• How could the principles of the Convention be operationalised into objective criteria and indicators to guide countries in seeking to identify their fair and adequate contributions to the globally needed mitigation effort and adaptation support and provision of the means of implementation?
• What could be the suitable timelines up to 2015 to a) identify objective ex-ante criteria to develop an agreed list of indicators for identifying each country’s fair efforts, b) for countries to submit initial mitigation and finance commitments and c) assess and revise commitments based on the ex-ante agreed list of indicators?

Mitigation

• What should be the global carbon budget and subsequent long term emission pathways indicative of emission levels at 2025, 2030 and 2050?
• What information should Parties include about their targets and commitments in order to allow individual and aggregate assessment against adequacy and equity, including their views about a timeline that allows for this assessment and revision of targets well before COP21?

Dear Delegates,

ECO wants to share its famous recipe for a delicious and ambitious omelet. We hope it will inspire you in cooking your submissions about strategies and approaches. Bear in mind that it takes up to 82 days to cook. ECO is looking forward to the September 2nd Green Climate Fund Board meeting to enjoy it!
Step 1: Crack 60 billion eggs of public finance for 2013 to 2015. Please make sure your eggs are comparable in size and shape. All the eggs should come from free range, public chickens. At least half the eggs should have adaptation yolk.
This is important if you want your omelet to be fair and balanced and nutritious.

Step 2: Whisk in some new and additional cups of milk (Please use FTT-branded milk). Add organic and fair-trade bunker-grown onions.

Step 3: Spice up your omelet with 5 tablespoons of MRV and grated cheese to make it more savoury and transparent.

Step 4: Grab your whisk and whisk like crazy; you should work up a sweat at this point.

Step 5: Fry your omelet in a high-level Ministerial pan if you really mean to deliver a tasty and trustworthy omelet.

Serves 132 guests from developing nations.
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ECO was pleased to wake up Sunday to the news that Presidents Obama and Xi had agreed to work together to combat climate change by phasing down the super greenhouse gases, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), under the Montreal Protocol. An agreement under Montreal could prevent emissions of 100 billion tonnes CO2e by 2050.

First that great party on Saturday, and then this?! For a while now, the EU has been busy pushing a COP decision at Warsaw that will urge Parties to begin this exact same process under the Montreal Protocol, and they are clearly excited to have China and the US in agreement. As Connie Hedegaard tweeted Saturday, “Welcome on board!”

All eyes are now on the next intersessional meeting of the Montreal Protocol happening in a few weeks, hoping it will turn this political arrangement into concrete, short-term action, which must not stop at phasing down, but start phasing out with appropriate finance and technology support to developing countries. HFCs are human-manufactured chemicals, primarily used in refrigeration, air conditioning and foam blowing, which were commercialised to replace the high-Global Warming Potential, ozone depleting, human manufactured chemicals phased out by the Montreal Protocol over the past 25 years.

Yet, HFCs are also extremely harmful to the climate, with global warming potentials much higher than carbon dioxide.
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Now that our love affair is truly over, you’ve got us singing the blues:

You never compromise anymore when we reach the limit

And there’s no commitment like before when you ratified the KP You’re trying hard to provoke us,

But comrade, comrade, I know it,

You’ve lost, that lovin’ feelin’,


Whoa, that lovin’ feelin’,


You’ve lost, that lovin’ feelin’,


Now it’s gone…gone…gone… wooooooh.

We could go on, but ECO really is not in the mode for singing anymore. You send your Top Gun here and let him strut and fret his hour upon the stage, waste two weeks of negotiating time, and for what? We understand you gave him the option to step off the stage, and he decided to continue to obstruct, just because he could. Is it just for the sake of his ego, or to try to elevate his prestige in Moscow, or just pure stubbornness?

If your excellent diplomat really has any good ideas for improving COP decision making processes, we haven’t heard them yet. So are we going to leave Bonn with a cloud the size of Siberia hanging over the negotiations? How dark will the storm clouds be over Warsaw when we arrive? Would we be better off not going?

ECO is amused by the blind belief in carbon markets the European Union maintains, while its own emission trading scheme has become a zombie. In the ADP, EU has argued that “new market mechanisms will deliver ambition”. Really? At home, Europe’s own emission trading is currently blocking ambition, and in fact encouraging a shift from gas to coal, as the emission allowance prices have crashed.

The reality is that demand for carbon market units is at an all-time low. Current prices are looming at around 0.4 Euro for Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) offset credits and at around 4 Euros for European allowances. The EU flagship policy is close to dead due to the reluctance of German Chancellor Merkel to fight for her legacy as a “climate chancellor”. This has allowed the conservatives in the European Parliament to block even the back loading of EU ETS (EU jargon for a temporary, short-term fix to the ETS).

Sandbag, famous for its brilliant carbon market analysis, estimated in its blog yesterday that in 2012 Europe’s emissions fell 27% below 1990 levels, once offsets surrendered into the EU ETS are factored in. This renders EU’s 20% by 2020 target irrelevant, and means that the EU’s ETS will remain useless in the foreseeable future.
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*By compromise, ECO mean somewhere in between what is scientifically needed and what YOU tell us is currently feasible.

The Conference of the Parties,
Recalling Article 4, paragraphs 1, 3, 4 and 5 and 7 of the Convention,

Reaffirming the unwavering commitment of parties to keep global average temperature increase well below 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels and the continuum approach between mitigation, adaptation, loss & damage and finance that is required to ensure equity before 2020.

Reaffirming the urgency to address the current imbalance in mitigation and adaptation finance – in light of recent studies showing the adaptation and loss and damage costs in developing countries will very likely be well in excess of US$100 billion per year by 2020.

Reaffirming the need to raise mitigation ambition levels between now and 2020, and achieving emission reductions on the order of 8-13 Gigatonnes of emissions in the pre-2020 period, beyond existing commitments and actions registered under the UNFCCC.

Supporting the authoritative assessments demonstrating that staying well below 2°C will require several hundred billion of incremental finance per year and the shifting of trillions of dollars of existing private sector investments into low carbon technologies and solutions.

Emphasising that the commitment by developing countries to provide $100 billion for developing countries will be delivered in the form of new and additional public finance, through budgetary allocations from developed countries, supplemented by revenues from alternative sources of public finance

Emphasising the shortcomings of the main revenue stream for the Adaptation Fund in relation to the expected low price of CERs under the Clean Development Mechanism and the need for new and additional commitments by developed countries.
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