ECO Newsletter

Don’t sell yourself short, Saudi Arabia, under any definition you’re important!

During Wednesday’s ADP session on the information required for INDCs, Saudi Arabia suggested that only the world’s top 20 emitters should worry about offering mitigation contributions to a Paris Protocol. The rest of the world, they said, should focus on adaptation, as their emissions are “minuscule”.

ECO already debunked the “minuscule” argument yesterday. Nothing is minuscule when you’re phasing-out fossil fuel emissions. And you can’t very well achieve the ADP’s purpose of “ensuring the highest possible mitigation efforts by all Parties” if 80% of Parties don’t mitigate. However, when you look at the countries in the top 20, Saudi has created quite the problem with its creative approach – it’s on the list, any way you slice it.

As ECO digs deeper into this Saudia Arabia-style differentiation, things become more and more curious. Someone call Norway; tell them to toss out their reductions target of 40%. Switzerland? Who needs its 20% target? On the other hand, ECO wonders whether Saudi Arabia has contacted its fellow Like-Minded Developing Country group members (China, India and Iran) to break the news that they should join Saudi Arabia in doing most of the mitigation effort!
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While ECO has been busy this week in Bonn, our spies in Luxembourg have been keeping an eye on EU environment and energy ministers. Yesterday, a joint EU Council meeting tackled two burning, and linked, issues: EU energy security and its post-2020 climate and energy framework. ECO’s intelligence network says this will be agreed in October.

You don’t have to be in the CIA to know that Europe as a whole is getting worried about its energy security. Countries like Germany have a secret weapon: binding targets for renewable energy and energy savings. Achieving these targets in Germany would mean at least 35% of its electricity will be supplied by largely home grown renewable sources. Similar policies in other EU countries will result in a 40% reduction in EU GHGs below 1900 levels by 2030. This recent development makes ECO feel slightly optimistic that EU politicians won’t need a decoder ring to discover that fossil fuels don’t equal energy security.

ECO hopes that all delegates took note of the EU’s intervention at the ADP ministerial meeting last week. The EU’s 40% reduction target by 2030 is just the first initial domestic offer, not the final number on the table with member states like UK, Germany and Sweden already calling for the EU to go further.
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Today, the ADP will meet to take stock of the progress made so far. When this session started, ECO announced its vision: in Paris countries have to commit to phasing out fossil fuel emissions and phasing in a 100% renewable energy future for all by mid-century.  In addition to really ambitious mitigation and financial commitments for the 2020-2025 period, of course!

ECO has been listening closely to Ministerial statements and interventions in the ADP.  By ECO’s count, over 60 countries have expressed support for the idea of a phase out. These include the LDCs (all 48 of them), AILAC (another 6 Parties), Marshall Islands, Grenada, Switzerland, Mexico, Norway, Germany as well as other European countries.

For example, Denmark spoke of their commitment to completely decarbonise by 2050, while Bhutan reiterated its commitment to remain carbon neutral. Nicaragua will already have reached 90% renewable energy use in power by 2020. South Africa supported the phase out of emissions for developed countries by 2050.

Now there may be some differences in terminology, (what with decarbonisation, carbon neutrality, net zero and phase out), as well as in the timeline (mid- or latter part of the century) and scope. But the message is undeniable: support for phasing out fossil fuel emissions and phasing in a 100% renewable energy future for all is growing rapidly.
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Up until now, the Joint Contact Group (JCG) on the 2013-2015 review has done an excellent job in its Structured Expert Dialogue (SED) in absorbing new and relevant scientific intelligence from the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report. When it comes to drawing any conclusions from all of the science though, the JCG is still only discussing procedural issues, like timing of the next SED.

Yes, ECO wants SED sessions at all SB sessions for gathering information from sources other than AR5. SB42, though, should be restricted to JCG only so that it can concentrate on its assigned task: to review the adequacy of the long-term global goal and overall progress towards achieving it. The SB42 session should be reserved for text work in order to prepare decisions for Paris as input into the ADP and to the COP.

To help, ECO suggests that:

– Parties conduct a stocktaking in the JCG at COP20 to capture the relevance of the information gathered from the IPCC AR5 during the SED.

– The JCG sends a strong signal to Workstream 2 of the ADP that the overall progress towards achieving the long-term goal is “off track” and that urgent action under WS2 is required for taking us to a 1.5°C pathway.
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Dear Chief Speech Writer,

Being a speech writer for one of the busiest people on earth is stressful, isn’t it? Don’t worry, ECO is here to help with some advice that you may want to consider in your draft speech for the Chinese leader in the upcoming Climate Summit.

ECO recommends having “coal” as the key word in your writing. We’re aware of the recent regional coal caps introduced in China, intended to tackle air pollution. Your country is making impressive progress in deviating from the coal dependent path. Why not write about it? Even better, how about expanding existing coal caps to the entire country and announcing this decision in the speech? Not only would this help alleviate air pollution in China, it would also bring down emissions significantly. You recently wrote your Premier an impressive speech to declare “war on pollution”. We’re pacifists at ECO, but could definitely get behind those efforts.

You should consider reaffirming the intention to communicate China’s “intended nationally determined contributions” (INDC) for the 2015 climate deal by the first quarter of next year. Speech elements that touch on the scope and ambition level of the Chinese offer will certainly be welcomed.
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We all agree that we need an ambitious agreement in Paris that can avert the worst of climate change. But how will we know that we’ve got an ambitious agreement when we march through the Arc de Triomphe with the final text in hand? How will we know that the INDCs put forward by Parties will collectively be sufficient to rise to the challenge and that each Party’s INDC will individually represent its fair share?

Easy – we assess them! And worry not, assess them we will!

ECO believes that, by Lima, Parties should agree both on the information to be included in the INDCs as well as on the assessment process before finalising them for the Paris deal.

In this light, ECO is surprised and confused to hear that the Like-Minded Group yesterday insist that Parties shouldn’t agree on anything more than the elements of information for INDCs in Lima. In other words, that there would be no agreement on assessing or reviewing of the targets.

ECO is also equally surprised by Russia, who said there is no need for assessing the contributions, Australia who had already voiced the same sentiment during Sunday’s ADP session, as well as Brazil who sees an assessment of targets before Paris as counter-productive.
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ECO thinks that we might have witnessed the potential beginnings of a copyright infringement dispute yesterday in the ADP when Saudi Arabia appeared to be freely utilising the current Canadian government’s talking points on climate change. The Saudi delegate insisted that being responsible for only 1% of global emissions is an excuse for inaction on mitigation; a line of reasoning with which Canada’s Prime Minister Harper and his ministers have long tried to justify how their expansion of dirty tar sands isn’t reckless nor is Canada’s general failure to deliver on Kyoto or Copenhagen commitments: Canada isn’t excused from acting on climate change just because its fraction of the global emissions total is small.

In case you, Dear Reader, missed it, Saudi Arabia suggested that its “minuscule” contribution of a mere 1% to global GHG emissions justifies that it can limit its INDC to adaptation action while only the top 20 of the world’s emitters should focus on mitigation. To suggest that countries with “only” 1% of global emissions should get a free pass on mitigation doesn’t make sense on two fronts. It doesn’t fit with a long term need to completely phase-out fossil fuel emissions by 2050 and phase-in renewable energy access for all, and it also contradicts the very purpose of the ADP, tasked with “ensuring the highest possible mitigation efforts by all Parties”.
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Further and greater emissions reductions between now and up until 2020 are needed if we want to keep the possibility of limiting global warming to below 1.5°C. That’s why ECO is looking forward to the discussions in Workstream 2, and on renewable energies (RE) and energy efficiency (EE) today. In order to achieve a 100% renewable energy future with sustainable energy access for all by 2050, at the latest, we need to act now. Here are a few suggestions from ECO

Let’s continue the technical expert meetings in 2014 and beyond until we have closed the gap. We need to also structure them so that they can lead to concrete outcomes though. These meetings should focus on identifying best practice policies, existing barriers and needs. Results from the meetings should be summarised in policy menus that countries can use to indicate what they’re already implementing, and which additional ones they could implement if the necessary support is provided by developed countries.

Existing institutions, like the TEC, CTCN, GCF, GEF and NAMA Registry, all need to be put to work, to scale up RE and EE. It is clear that Workstream 2 needs to prepare the COP decisions that will provide the necessary guidance, for example ensuring that the Green Climate Fund’s mitigation window prioritises investments in RE and EE solutions in the pre-2020 period.
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Full points for the moderators of the Long Term Climate Finance discussions yesterday for trying to inject some energy into the rather stale discussions of scaling up finance to meet the commitment of US$100 billion by 2020. Their chosen format of “world café discussions” with participants encouraged people to circulate between the four small group discussions in Salon Beethoven.

ECO picked up some encouraging snippets from the conversation like “need for quantitative and qualitative aspects of pathways to $100 billion”,  “develop innovative sources like bunker finance and financial transaction taxes”, and “50% for adaptation is important.” Clearly something has to change to get something concrete and useful out of this process. Perhaps changing the frame of reference might be helpful.

ECO has heard some countries lamenting about how difficult it was to provide public finance at the scale of tens or a hundred billion dollars per year. Put in the context of the scale of investments and financial flows in the larger economy, the financing required to address climate change is indeed quite modest and would be entirely manageable, if climate change was given the importance it deserved.

Some examples of scale of financial flows and investments in the global economy:

$1.8 quadrillion: Amount of financial transactions in the UK in 2013.
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