Good COP, Bad COP
By Kate Aronoff and David Adler
Presidents, prime ministers, and representatives from around the world — including a delegation from the US House and Senate — are gathered in Madrid to continue their negotiations over the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The conference, known as COP25, has been presented as the key test of political will to address the climate emergency.
The talks coincide with a growing demand for climate action that can meet the scale of the climate crisis, embodied in several of the world’s largest economies by calls for a Green New Deal: an economy-wide mobilization to decarbonize the economy.
At the same time, however, Donald Trump has begun paperwork to formally withdraw the US from the 2016 Paris Agreement, encouraging other countries to break with COP and follow suit.
During their visit to Madrid, Nancy Pelosi and the delegation of House Democrats rightly sought to emphasize the importance of maintaining a spirit of multilateralism in the UNFCCC. “Our delegation is here to send a message that Congress’s commitment to take action on the climate crisis is iron clad,” Pelosi said.
But in their outrage over Trump’s decision to depart from the Paris Agreement, Democrats have overstated the potential of the UNFCCC to prevent environmental breakdown — and understated the need for much more ambitious US leadership to move beyond the Paris commitments to deliver a global Green New Deal.
Days before COP25 began, the UN Environment Program’s (UNEP) Emissions Gap Report found that if every nation fulfilled its current Nationally Determined Contribution (NDCs) — an unlikely prospect in the current political context — global temperatures would still be on track to rise by 3.2 degrees celsius, leaving major coastal cities and whole nations underwater.
To fulfill the basic mandate inscribed by the Paris Agreement — namely, to cap warming at “well below” 2 degrees celsius, and work toward 1.5 — the UNEP calls for a drop in global emissions of 7.6 percent every year between 2020 and 2030: larger than any single annual emissions reduction in history.
Averting runaway climate catastrophe will require the US to lead on climate in a way that it never has before. This will require supporting, rather than blocking, calls for stringent emissions reductions, equitable financing, and technology transfer within the UNFCCC. But while there’s a great deal of room for US leadership in returning to Paris, its power as a non-binding agreement is severely limited. Confronting the climate crisis head-on will mean looking beyond the confines of the UNFCCC to leverage the enormous power the US wields in multilateral institutions and global trade.
This blog considers each of these in turn, fleshing out several ways to turn platitudes for climate action into concrete policy. First, we consider three steps US policymakers can take to engage the global community in good faith at the UNFCCC. We then describe critical interventions to be made outside of it, in the Bretton Woods Institutions, trade agreements and with other countries committed to a stable future for people and planet both.
GOOD COP:
At the UN climate talks in Durban in 2011, lead US negotiator Todd Stern summed up decades of America’s approach to global climate politics: “If equity’s in, we’re out.”
Historically, calls for emissions reductions at the level science demands have come from a Global South already fighting for survival amidst climate impacts, and been shut down by wealthy nations in the Global North by any means necessary. Well before Trump took office US negotiators spied on their counterparts in other countries and pulled strings to have diplomats who challenged them kicked off of other countries’ delegations.
As the world’s largest economy, the US can exercise de facto veto power within the UNFCCC, and frequently does — whether to downplay reports from the IPCC, elevate the concerns of polluting corporations or bury conversations about climate finance.
The visiting delegation of Democrats and their congressional allies back at home have the opportunity to help change that, taking responsibility for the United States’ role as the world’s largest historical emitter of fossil fuels and advantage of its potential to catalyze the transition to a sustainable global order fit for the 21st century.
What would it look like for the US to lead?
The short answer: equity over profit. Data for Progress presents three key points for US policymakers.
Present a science-based Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) and use it to push ambition among wealthy nations including the G20, which account for 78 percent of global emissions.
Pursuing equity-based pathways for rapid decarbonization would mean aiming for net zero emissions as close to 2030 as possible, leaving space in the global carbon budget for developing countries that still lack the technical and financial capacity for such a stark transition to catch up. Moreover, the backbone of the Obama Administration’s NDC — the Clean Power Plan — dealt only with the power sector. Returning to the Obama era status quo simply isn’t an option: thorough decarbonization means a truly economy-wide transformation, and a government that factors a changing climate into every decision it makes.
Making that politically palatable means pairing it with a credible promise to improve the lives of ordinary Americans: a Green New Deal. Enacting such a plan within the United States at the speed and scale science demands can also be an electoral boon to Democrats looking to attain and maintain majorities the White House and the Senate — and recast climate as an issue of public investment, rather than collective sacrifice.
Concretely, this includes: (1) Triaging and eliminating direct and indirect fossil fuel subsidies — including tax breaks for oil exploration and preferential leasing--estimated to account for $15 billion each year (2) Placing a nationwide moratorium on permits for new fossil fuel infrastructure and reinstating the crude oil export ban, lifted by Congress in 2015 (3) Preventing the US Import-Export Bank from financing fossil fuel projects abroad, which totaled $34 billion during the Obama administration.
Commit to equitable climate financing and functional governance mechanisms.
This starts with an at least $200 USD billion pledge from the US to the Green Climate Fund, and support for institutional reform within that body to ensure it can handle a rapid influx of funds that are distributed promptly and equitably. As with NDCs, this pledge should be a basis for the US to encourage other wealthy countries that have benefitted from South to North resource transfers to provide their fair share of financing to developing countries. These conversations should also explore debt relief for these nations, opening up valuable fiscal space for governments that have taken on considerable debt to recover from a wide range of already-existing climate impacts.
As recommended by the Civil Society Equity Review, adequate funds should be made available for not just mitigation, but for adaptation and loss and damage, areas where private sector interest is far harder to come by. The US should support a comprehensive review of the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage (WIM) and push for the WIM to be bolstered with a well-defined facility for allocating financing, technology, and technical support. This facility should also compile an annual public report collating the gap between needed and committed funds. Complementing this should be fleshed out transparency measures and a strong liability mechanism for holding parties to both the Paris Agreement and the UNFCCC accountable to their common but differentiated responsibilities. This should be accomplished through a COP-mandated task force of experts--encompassing academics, state, and civil society representatives---tasked with designing that facility and soliciting new resources[1].
Support efforts by Global South governments to establish a UNFCCC-wide conflict of interest definition and policy framework.
Since the dawn of the industrial age, 20 fossil fuel producers have been responsible for a third of all carbon emissions[2]. Several of these companies engaged in systematic efforts to mislead the public about the existence of climate change and delay action through groups like the now-defunct Global Climate Coalition and trade associations like the International Chamber of Commerce, still active in annual climate talks.
Yet they continue to freely move about the UNFCCC and exercise tremendous influence over decision-makers. Last year at COP 24, Shell proudly took credit for drafting parts of the Paris Agreement, and that document’s outsized emphasis on untested market-based mechanisms — at the exclusion of more stringent regulatory measures — is thanks largely to the longtime lobbying of BP and other polluters.
The World Health Organization has had a longstanding conflict of interest policy that bars tobacco industry representatives from participating in its core legislative negotiations. Its Framework Convention on Tobacco Control protects those talks against the “vested interest of the tobacco industry.”
The UNFCCC has neither a working definition of conflicts of interest nor a framework for rooting them out. There are also scant guidelines around lobbying. For several years, Like-Minded Developing Countries, the African Group and a number of governments from the Global South have pushed for the adoption of just such a framework. The US and EU have opposed these efforts. US national and subnational governments committed to climate action should enthusiastically support the introduction of a conflict of interest policy to the UNFCCC, finally recognizing the “vested interest” of the fossil fuel industry in furthering the climate crisis.
BAD COP:
But there is a ceiling on what can be accomplished at COP25. After all, the Paris Agreement and UNFCCC are non-binding, with very weak compliance mechanisms to give it legal standing against defector countries--thanks in large part by efforts from the US.
To lead on climate, then, the US must recognize the limits to Paris Agreement, not only its merits, and move beyond the UN’s intergovernmental framework to usher in a broader green transition in the global economy.
What lies beyond the COP process? And how can the delegation of Democrats continue to lead once they have left Madrid?
The short answer: a truly global Green New Deal. Data for Progress presents three key areas for the US to lead a new climate multilateralism toward that goal:
Convene a summit toward the reform of the international financial system away from extraction and evasion toward investment and environmental justice.
Decarbonization of the global economy will require the deployment of vast resources across borders and into communities that currently lack access to fair financing. There is a historic amount of cash sitting idle in the financial system. As the stewards of the world’s largest economy, the US can lead the effort to press those resources into the service of the green transition.
The remaining institutions of the Bretton Woods system, the World Bank and the IMF, have so far failed to play this role. Recent research the watchdog Bretton Woods Project found that the World Bank has actively encouraged and facilitated the extraction of fossil fuels through its financing programmes.
Rachel Kyte, Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations for Sustainable Energy for All, has called it “utterly insane” that green financing to the Global South remains stuck at 2015 levels. She has joined the call for a “new Bretton Woods summit.”
Such a summit could go far beyond the constraints of the COP process to set up new mechanisms for multilateral financing, coordinated research and development, and joint crack-downs on global tax evasion.
Collaborate with other countries to develop a new system of trade that is capable of holding corporations accountable for contributions to environmental breakdown across their supply chains.
Domestically, a Green New Deal promises to transform US consumption in ways that reduce ballooning demand for materials and precious minerals extracted in the US and from the rest of the world, as industrial policy encourages the recycling and reuse of metals that currently go to waste. But as demand for renewables explodes, the extraction of technology metals such as lithium and cobalt will be inevitable.
The enormous purchasing power of the US can establish industry-wide labor and environmental standards to govern these processes, building on already existing frameworks to make sure that any new projects are fully compatible with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People and that they bar development in protected areas such as the Amazon.
In reordering the priorities of the global economy, a new trading order can create mechanisms for accountability from US-domiciled companies operating abroad. US legislators should advocate for an inversion of the Investor State Dispute Settlement system, for instance, in order to allow communities to make legal challenges to corporations on the basis of their human and ecological impact — rather than allowing corporations to challenge states on the basis of environmental protections. More broadly, any trade deal the US negotiates should center climate goals as a top priority, pursuing collaboration across a range of frons — on Intellectual Property, manufacturing and more — rather than race-to-the-bottom competition with allies and ‘adversaries’ alike.
Join with like-minded countries that have committed to rapid decarbonization to make progress where existing multilateral institutions cannot.
New international institutions do not emerge overnight, and the ones we have are not moving fast enough. Whilst supporting more ambition within the Paris Agreement and the UNFCCC more broadly, US legislators can make a first step toward stronger multilateral collaboration on climate by convening with governments committed to Green New Deal principles — a small but growing group, which now includes countries like Spain, COP25’s host — to set binding policy goals, share best practices, and devise commitments commensurate to each country’s means and needs. After years of stymying progress under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the US has a long way to go to rebuild trust on climate with the world, and particularly with the Global South. It’s why equity should be the basis of any climate plan looking beyond its own borders. An equity-based approach can help build a functional global order capable of withstanding the climate impacts already happening and set to accelerate, all the while decarbonizing rapidly. And it can build the buy-in needed to make it happen.
The prospect of the United States prioritizing climate equity at the international level is unprecedented — and holds nearly unlimited potential. That the US exercises official or unofficial veto power in most multilateral institutions has not been a sum positive for the world; any progressive US government should take democratizing our international institutions as a central goal. In the short term, though, US leaders committed to decarbonization can mobilize existing institutions to advance the cause of climate and environmental justice — from within or without the White House.
Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) is a Senior Fellow at Data for Progress.
David Adler (@davidrkadler) is a Senior Fellow at Data for Progress.
[1] For additional detail see: http://civilsocietyreview.org/report2019/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/09/revealed-20-firms-third-carbon-emissions