THE CARBON WAR

From carbon capitalism to climate capitalism 121
A Korean student is the first person to speak to me. She and a cluster of
her peers pass pamphlets to delegates advocating the need for universal love to
underpin the global climate deal that must be done in Paris. They have made
green paper wallets to give out to as a token of this love. With great inappropriateness,
I feel like hugging her.
Three women in spectacular saris wander past, deep in conversation.
Are they representatives of a citizen group, or Indian government negotiators?
There is no way of telling.
A tatty life-size polar bear lies dead on the ground nearby. A notice pinned
to his chest announces “Arctic Methane Crisis”.
My first meeting is with a UN official: a session to plot how the carbon
bubble argument can best be injected, in and around the negotiations, to boost
the prospects of success in Paris. He describes the shape of the deal that the
UN is angling for.
Countries intending to be parties to the eventual Paris treaty must submit
their commitments for emissions reductions in 2015, ideally by the end of
the first quarter, but if not then, in plenty of time for the UN to add up where
the sum of commitments leads in terms of the amount of global warming it
commits the world to. The Secretariat considers it highly unlikely that the
sum total of Paris commitments will put the world on course for two degrees
in one leap, given the tortuous history of the negotiations. But that does not
mean the community of nations will have failed in the quest to contain the
problem, so long as several other vital things are captured in the Paris treaty.
Critically, governments must commit honestly to review their collective progress
regularly, every five years ideally, with the avowed intention of ramping
up emissions commitments until the world is on course for staying below two
degrees. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s work informs
the negotiators that they have a fair chance of keeping the world below two
degrees provided net greenhouse-gas emissions are phased out altogether by
the second half of the century. That goal will become ever more credible, so the
UN believes, simply with the passage of time, as the feasibility of a zero-carbon
future becomes ever clearer to governments and populations from the evidence
of their own eyes. What this means is that governments must view their Paris
commitments – Intended Nationally Determined Commitments, to use the
UN jargon (let me simply call them national emissions commitments in the
rest of the book) – as minimum first steps, not the final word.
As for the legal framework of the treaty, negotiators are these days much
influenced by the intractable problem of climate denial in the US Congress,