The agreement (seriously! 🙂 ): everyone can do their own thing –
After untold millions of dollars, years of essential travel to exotic holiday locations, and embarrassing failure after embarrassing failure, the world appears to finally be on the brink of signing a legally binding climate agreement.
The proposed agreement is, everyone can do their own thing.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald;
The United States is considering a proposal to combat climate change that would require countries to offer plans for curtailing greenhouse gas emissions on a certain schedule but would leave it to individual nations to determine how deep their cuts would be, said Todd Stern, the nation’s chief climate negotiator. … Negotiators are aiming to sign that deal next year in Paris.”
I guess we can all feel a sense of relief, that all that effort, time and money has not been a total waste of resources – that it has finally yielded something tangible.
h/t to Eric Worrall
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Does anyone trust these guys? The devil must be in the detail. Let’s read the fine print, because they’re not programmed to lose.
Tim
If I recall it right, the Obama Care legislation came with an exhortation, pass the bill and then you can read the fine print. So I agree with you, carefully read the fine print BEFORE agreeing to anything even if it is presented like you should not.
To be sold out on an issue so poorly constructed like this, is creating a can of worms for future generations along with much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Demand data and truth in science first, when you get that debate the issue in public and then keep demanding answers before signing anything, even more so with a non event sweetheart deal created as a salve to the guilty, and an excuse to open the door to trickery, Mike’s “Nature Trick” got us into this, we don’t need another trick to give further life to the tricksters.
We should not underestimate the danger posed by the administration’s proposal. What Team Obama regards as “your thing,” is whatever policies a nation undertakes to meet its obligations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a.k.a. the 1992 Rio Treaty.
Rio is often viewed — mistakenly — as a “voluntary” agreement. As my colleague Chris Horner points out, the word “shall” — the term of legal obligation — occurs more than 100 times in the treaty.
Unlike Kyoto, Rio did not set specific emission reduction targets. Nonetheless, under Article 4.2(a), each Annex I country “shall adopt national policies and take corresponding measures on the mitigation of climate change, by limiting its anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and protecting and enhancing its greenhouse gas sinks and reservoirs.”
So the UN FCCC, too, is a ‘do your own thing’ treaty. but it’s not ‘voluntary,’ because if you’re an Annex I country, you “shall” have a ‘thing’ and you “shall” ‘do’ it.
The administration interprets the EPA’s Clean Power Plan and other executive agency climate initiatives as the “thing” we “shall” do pursuant to the Rio Treaty.
Moreover, since Rio is already ratified, Team Obama claims there’s no need to obtain Senate advice and consent on whatever Obama negotiators commit to as our “thing.” For further discussion, see this New York Times column: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/us/politics/obama-pursuing-climate-accord-in-lieu-of-treaty.html?_r=2
To be sure, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee explicitly rejected this open-ended interpretation of our Rio Treaty obligations. The Committee stipulated that any “decision by the executive branch to reinterpret the Convention to apply legally binding targets and timetables for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases to the United States would alter the ‘shared understanding’ of the Convention between the Senate and the executive branch and would therefore require the Senate’s advice and consent.”
The administration, however, could care less about a 22-year old committee ‘reservation,’ and no court would attempt to enforce it.
So Administration officials are using the Clean Power Plan etc. as a basis for demanding similar “pledges” from other nations. More importantly, they’ll try to use the hoped-for agreement to lock in Obama’s climate policies beyond 2016.
The game plan, as I see it, is to negotiate an agreement under which the next president and future Congresses won’t be able to upend Obama’s climate policies without violating our Framework Convention “pledges” to the “international community.”
Marlo, they can demand “similar” pledges all they like, but all that will do is create further incentives to relocate manufacturing to non-Annex 1 countries. How much more industry does the US wish to lose to Maquilladora? One of the real implications of this that I see is that it’s great potential ammunition for protectionism against other Annex 1 countries.
Marlo, it also makes a complete shambles of the Kyoto trading mechanisms, does it not? And where in all this is the key UNFCCC goal of north-south financial transfers?
The most important thing is the intention to sign. That means you need lots of trips to nice places for negotiations, all paid for by the taxpayer of course.