THE CARBON WAR

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The Winning of The Carbon War
At this early stage, one can only imagine the difficulties negotiators are
facing in those small rooms, trying to turn their leaders’ rhetoric into reality. The
last time the co-chairs of these negotiations attempted to produce a slimmeddown
draft text, in October, the G77 developing-country bloc rejected it as
too biased towards the rich nations. A 20-page draft swelled to 50, riven with
square brackets, as a consequence.
Coal will be at the heart of the bargaining. An organisation with a very
similar name to Carbon Tracker, Climate Action Tracker, is all over the coal
issue. Their quantification of the problem makes daunting reading. They report
2,440 coal plants planned around the world, totalling 1,428 gigawatts. 1,617
of them are in India and China. The rest are in Indonesia, Japan, South Africa,
South Korea, the Philippines, Turkey, and the EU. If all of them were to be built,
by 2030, emissions from coal power would be 400% higher than a trajectory
consistent with 2°C. Yet it emerges now that more than 100 countries are calling
for the Paris agreement to cite a warming limit of 1.5°C, at least as an aspiration.
It will be fascinating to see how that nexus of conflicting issues and interests
unravels itself. If it does.
Forests are today’s theme at Le Bourget. Prince Charles is again to the
fore, assuring the summit that attitudes to protecting forests are beginning to
change, that new initiatives are being introduced on multiple fronts. However,
too many companies still turn a blind eye to the fact that their commercial
activities destroy forests, he says. “It remains the case that many of the world’s
largest companies and their financial backers pay scant, by which I really mean
no, attention to the deforestation footprint of their supply chains.”
Marks & Spencer and other corporates, keen to show they are not in that
camp, sign a new pledge at the summit, committing to prioritise the development
of sustainable palm oil, beef, paper and other commodities.
I sit in the media centre with my old friend Tony Juniper, now an advisor
to Prince Charles, soaking up everything that comes my way and trying to make
sense of it. On computer terminals provided by the UN, I can surf between
plenary halls, press conferences, and public events, without attending any
of them. I head off periodically for meetings with informants in delegations,
NGOs, and the many companies attending the summit. The coffee is good, the
food is more than edible, the queues in the many cafes and restaurants are not
too long. This, plus the many old friends and interesting acquaintances I keep
running into in the corridors, means I would be in danger of enjoying myself
if the stakes weren’t so high.