Antinuclear

Island states and low-lying “climate vulnerable” countries like the Marshall Islands, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Vietnam run an unexpectedly effective campaign to change the goal of the agreement from limiting global warming at 2C to bringing it back to less than 1.5C. They assemble powerful supporters, including the United States, the European Union, Germany, France, Brazil and – eventually – Australia. President Obama spent some of his two days in Paris meeting with island state leaders and calls himself an “island boy”. The young activists paint 1.5C on their faces and sing songs about it in the streets.

In the end it all boils down to an agreed “purpose” in the Paris deal to hold global temperature increases to “well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit (them) to 1.5C, recognising that this would significantly reduce risks and impacts of climate change”……..

I’m talking to Howard Bamsey, who I’ve encountered at many of these events – he was Australia’s lead negotiator in Kyoto in 1997 when the protocol was agreed as well as the special envoy on climate change in Copenhagen in 2009. He says he’s been to 18 or 19 of these “conferences of the parties” or COPs – he’s lost count. He’s an academic now and has always been a details man, not someone to get carried away by the speeches and the singing.

And despite everything, he’s optimistic.

“I’ve had this impression growing on me all week. When this process started governments were all important, whether they moved or not was the whole story. Here governments are only part of the picture. When we went to side events by business or environment groups 15 or 20 years ago it was all about the good ideas they might be able to do if they had the right policies. Now it’s about what they have already done,” he says.

I think back to the start of the conference. There was this thing called the Lima Paris Action Agenda where hundreds of businesses and thousands of regions and cities made promises to cut emissions that streamed into my email inbox in a torrent.

Mondelēz International promised US$400mn to support the production of sustainable cocoa with zero net deforestation in Africa; Germany, Norway and the United Kingdom announced they’d provide $5bn by 2020 if forest countries demonstrated measured, reported and verified emission reductions; 20 investor groups, representing US$3.2tr, committing to ‘decarbonisation’ of US$600bn in assets, 114 big companies promised to reduce emissions including Ikea, Coca-Cola, Dell, General Mills, Kellogg’s, NRG Energy, Procter & Gamble, Sony and Walmart……….

Michael Jacobs, senior adviser for the New Climate Economy project, says the long-term goals in the agreement send investors the clearest sign “that the world was on an irreversible and irrevocable downward trend in emissions”.

So I leave thinking the Paris agreement – for the first time setting expectations for all nations and for the world – might just be a strong enough signal to give real momentum towards slowing global warming despite the dysfunctional international process and the imperfect national promises and the arguments over detail that will continue interminably at such conferences.

That’s a cynical optimist’s view of this extraordinary Paris summit. http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/dec/13/paris-climate-deal-gives-even-a-cynic-grounds-for-optimism