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Brexit: Wish I May

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The US presidential election is losing interest to the average political junkie, though the hard core can fuss over the margin of victory. We Told You So (footnote). So time for a Brexit update, to remind you what a real politician looks like digging herself out of a deep hole.

MayThe politician is Theresa May, catapulted to 10 Downing Street after her rivals obligingly self-destructed. She is disciplined and chilly to an extent that makes Margaret Thatcher or Hilary Clinton look like Oprah Winfrey. So she follows the first rule of being at the bottom of a hole, which is to say as little as possible. It’s a waste of time to guess her real thoughts and intentions. As with Kremlinology, you watch the deeds instead.

What has she done on Brexit, which she opposed without enthusiasm? Continue Reading…

Kristof on Syria: The Politics and Strategy of Stupid Stuff

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Nicholas Kristof wants the United States to set up a safe zone in Syria, as Hillary Clinton has suggested in her platform. “Don’t do stupid stuff,” as Obama once famously described his Middle East policy, isn’t good enough, says Kristof.

From a moral standpoint, it is impossible to argue with Kristof. Syria is a nightmare. From a political and strategic standpoint, it is quite another matter. A place and a name epitomize the counter-argument: Srebrenica and Adam Szubin.

Srebrenica was the “safe zone” established by the allies in Bosnia during the 1990’s. The Bosnian Serbs overran it when they felt like it, massacring thousands of Bosniak Muslims against a pathetically-overmatched Dutch “peacekeeping” force. Who is to say it won’t happen again?

Put another way, a “safe zone” is not a policy, strictly speaking, but rather a policy goal. Making refugees safe is to a partial extent just a way of restating the problem. And it is worse in Syria because Assad and Putin are not interested in a safe zone and will be happy to use their air power to obliterate it. That means risking an air war with them.

So: which troops will guard the safe zone? So far, no answer. Kristof says pretty weakly that Obama should lead some sort of international effort to develop some sort of multinational force. Good luck with that one: that’s what we did in Srebrenica. The only way a US policy can count on a genuine safe zone is with genuine US ground troops. Do we want that? (And no, the Kurds won’t do it because it won’t be in a Kurdish area, and they won’t want hundreds of thousands of non-Kurdish refugees in a Kurdish zone). Do we want our planes dogfighting with Russian aircraft, and Assad’s still-powerful anti-aircraft guns?

Now, maybe we do. Maybe it’s worth it. Syria is a humanitarian catastrophe of the greatest proportions. It’s a huge risk. US soldiers will die; they will be captured. But to avert a Syrian holocaust? That might be within the finest traditions of American idealism.

And that’s where Adam Szubin comes in.

Adam Szubin was nominated by President Obama nearly a year and half ago to be Undersecretary of the Treasury for Financial Intelligence and Terrorism. That’s a pretty important job. And you would think that it would be important to have a confirmed nominee there.

You would be wrong. The Senate Republicans have not even scheduled a hearing for him. He is sitting there, “Acting” Undersecretary, and his term ends at the end of this Congress. Without confirmation, there will be no one to fill his space.

What does that have to do with anything? Simply this: to put US troops and pilots in harm’s way in an active war theater over a long haul, especially for purely humanitarian purposes, requires broad and deep bipartisan support. No President would or should go out on a limb for something like this, which is inherently politically risky, unless he or she knows that it will not become politicized.

And the Senate Republicans can’t even give a hearing for a frigging Undersecretary of the Treasury.

Not a good example? How about this? President Obama asked Congress a year and a half ago for an AUMF against ISIS. As Tim Kaine rightly says, it’s pretty close to a legal requirement. And the Republicans have refused to even take it up. It is obvious why: if they take it up, and they approve it, then they are partially responsible for US deaths. But if they reject it, then they are partially responsible for ISIS victories. So they have taken the most craven and irresponsible course and have refused to do anything, which means that anything bad that happens is not their fault and they can just attack the President. Putting party over country is the guiding light of the modern GOP.

And Nick Kristof thinks that in this political context, President Obama should go off on his own and put together a Syrian safe zone. “Mr. President, please, put your head on that guillotine. No, really, Mitch McConnell won’t bring down the knife.” Sometimes it’s good to be a New York Times columnist.

Obama’s political opponents often accuse his supporters of thinking him a saint. He is far from that, but more to the point, they want him to act like a saint, risking his political career and legacy while full well knowing that he will be attacked for it by the most irresponsible and cowardly opposition in the United States since before the Civil War. Sorry, he’s in the politics business, not in the saint business. More importantly, they want him to risk the lives of American soldiers and potentially get us into a quagmire.

Can we do something in Syria? Yes; the United States is the most powerful country in the history of world. Is there a compelling moral reason to do it? Yes. But any adult foreign policy requires a clear-eyed view of the benefits and risks involved, and any criticism of that policy requires a mature sense of the relevant political calculus. Attacking President Obama for not acting in this strategic, military, and political context is not a critique: it is an emotional spasm.

Impeaching Dilma

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The lower house of the Brazilian Congress has voted to impeach President Dilma Rousseff. The middle-class anti-Dilma crowds in the streets of big cities are ecstatic. At last the PT will be brought to account for its corruption! The smaller pro-Dilma working-class crowds are despondent. The right-wing plot to reverse the results of the 2014 reelection by a rigged quasi-judicial process is succeeding.

Not so fast. “Fewer than ten” of the 511 deputies voting, by a wearisome roll-call with mini-speeches, bothered to mention the actual impeachment charges, preferring to emote about their families, the flag, and so on. (Colin Snider, h/t Erik Loomis at LGM; I watched a part of the vote on TV). They are here, in Jovair Arantes’ report to the committee that tabled them for the vote.

What the anti-corruption crowds want to see is Dilma answering for her well-paid work as a government-appointed director of Petrobras while the parastatal oil major was shovelling $2.8 billion in bribes, slush funds and kickbacks to PT and other politicians. They are not going to get this. The charges are budgetary irregularities. That’s what the trial in the Senate will be about – unless it turns into a kangaroo court, bringing in corruption allegations with no semblance of due process.

The alleged offences are mind-bogglingly technical stuff I’m not competent to assess. More’s the point, the fiddles have it seems been common practice in previous administrations and state governments, and were only recently made illegal. The Congress has other, political means of remedying the ills, like refusing to adopt a budget until the objectionable spending is legitimised or unwound. The impeachment trial will fizzle as spectacle, and once the public realizes what is going on, a conviction will not obviously be in the political interest of the senators.

The other view, represented by Glenn Greenwald’s piece here, is that it’s a nefarious right-wing plot. The one claim of his I can assess from direct observation is media bias, and I don’t see nearly enough of it to explain what is going on. The powerful Globo network is conservative, sure. But it’s the Telegraph or BSkyB more than Fox or the Daily Mail. Where does it give platforms to hard right agitators, the way Fox News does in the USA, or headline stories of immigrant welfare scroungers? The key media mechanisms of the protests have been Twitter and Facebook, which are chaotic and can’t readily be controlled. Where is the Brazilian equivalent of tweetmeister Donald Trump?

The timeline doesn’t work either. When Dilma was first elected, the Brazilian rich had some reason to be alarmed. Perhaps she would revert to her youthful radicalism and follow Chavez into left-wing populism. She is now five years in, and there is no sign of this. Her administration has SFIK taken no major new initiatives on anything. It’s been content to safeguard Lula’s legacy. The rich can sleep safe. She is deeply unpopular with all classes, from her failure to prevent the commodities-driven recession, and a conservative victory in the next election is very likely. Why take very risky steps to overthrow her now?

A rival theory. The recession and the corruption revelations have made not only the PT but the entire political class deeply unpopular. 59% of the Brazilian Congress, left and right, are under investigation for “serious charges including bribery, electoral fraud and homicide”. The key driver of the impeachment process is Eduardo Cunha, the Speaker, himself under investigation for receiving bribes from Petrobras and holding undeclared Swiss bank accounts. Attacking Dilma makes sense as a path to political survival: if Dilma falls, he will become the conservative hero of the hour. A good many of those who voted for impeachment face the same incentives. The whole thing, on this analysis, is basically just opportunism.

It won’t turn out out well. The charade risks discrediting not only the existing parties but democracy itself. So far there is no Strong Man visible in the wings, but one could emerge any time. Reforming an entire political and administrative culture without revolution of left or right is extraordinarily difficult. As merely an irregular visitor I have no suggestions as to how to do it. But this impeachment will not help.

PS The Al Capone argument
They got Al Capone for tax evasion, not murder and bootlegging. Wasn’t that OK in the circumstances?
1. Al Capone was definitely guilty of tax evasion, it wasn’t a made-up or grey-area offence.
2. The reason he didn’t declare his income was that it came from crime. There was a direct link between the lesser offence, for which there was evidence that could stand up in court, and the criminal activity for which there wasn’t.
3. The claimed purpose of the impeachment is to restore integrity to Brazilian politics. You can’t do that by a fundamentally dishonest prosecution.

Donald Trump, Michael Hayden, unlawful orders, and the Establishment

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Michael Hayden is a retired four-star general who ran the NSA and then the CIA under George W. Bush. Bill Maher asked him about Donald Trump’s plans to, for example, kill the families of terrorists, and Hayden replied that the armed forces would refuse to obey unlawful orders.

This is (1) unsurprising (2) surprising and (3) significant.

Continue Reading…

No, Michael Hayden-The Case for Drones is Much More Complicated Than That

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I don’t really know where to start with Michael Hayden’s piece in the New York Times defending drone strikes. Perhaps with the report last fall from the Intercept that shows that the very data we use to characterize the results of drone strikes is cooked “by categorizing unidentified people killed in a strike as enemies, even if they were not the intended targets.” Drone strikes are automatically effective if you assume they are effective, and you can do that by the casual us versus them analysis that says “If you live in one of these areas, or are walking near particular people, you’re probably a terrorist.” The only (ironic) way in which this might be true is that, if you didn’t hate the United States before indiscriminate drone killings, you’re much more likely to afterwards, when someone you know was killed. Not that the targets are necessarily well-chosen, either. One analyst has described these methods as “completely bullshit.”

But what I want to point out is the argument Hayden makes about the efficacy of drone strikes. He says definitively that, despite the errors (which he acknowledges the existence but not the magnitude of), the program is worth it because it has prevented terror attacks. I’m not sure how we know this definitively. It’s always good to invoke a mushroom cloud when we’re talking about killing people in other countries (see the Iraq war), but these are always questions of probability, not certainty. I get that that’s inherent in intelligence work, but I think it’s probably overstating it to say that we necessarily got X benefit for Y deaths.

The bigger problem, as I see it, is the narrow way in which Hayden’s analysis views the costs and alternatives. Drones might be justified if they are the best option we have, but drone use shouldn’t be compared to doing nothing, but compared to doing something else.  Whether it’s worth it “to America” has to include the long-term damage it is doing to our reputation around the world.  But I’d like to think we should also consider the lives and psychological well-being of innocent people who are being randomly killed.

I guess Hayden’s fundamental cost-benefit analysis is this: extra-judicial killings are “worth it” only because he sees innocent lives as worthless. Perhaps they are to Michael Hayden—after all, these are mostly Muslims living in foreign lands. I don’t see it that way, nor do I see this as being representative of the values of the United States.

Tweeting the death of coal

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Has a tweet made history before?
gopal-tweet-590x204Piyush Goyal is India’s Minister of Energy.

To recap. India’s current electricity policy is based on high projections of demand, which is fair enough as 400 million Indians have no electricity at all. The policy on renewables and coal is is “both of the above”. The official coal target is a doubling of coal burning for electricity this decade, and more later. A programme for 16 giant “ultra mega” coal power stations was launched in 2005, though just two have been completed. Adani, Reliance, and Tata, the corporations who would build many of the others, have many shovel-ready projects on their shelves but have been curiously reluctant to break ground on them.

Anecdotal confirmation of major problems in the Indian coal sector comes from this recent report of a developer abandoning plans for a coal plant and replacing it with a solar farm on the same site. Coal stocks at power stations have doubled since last year. Continue Reading…

The Treasure and the Law

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” and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.” Golden words; they may yet save us. But how on earth, given the massive forces against such high ambition, did they get into the Paris Agreement last week? A year ago, this was being pushed by the “group of small island nations”, tiny, powerless and on the face of it doomed. Last Saturday, 196 countries agreed to their central demand. How come?

Rudyard Kipling had a nice account of the drafting of Magna Carta in 1204, in Chapter 10 of Puck of Pook’s Hill, “The Treasure and the Law.” The Jewish physician-financier Kadmiel tells the story to Dan and Una (Langton is Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury):

‘So it was I, not Elias,’ he went on quietly, ‘that made terms with Langton touching the fortieth of the New Laws.’

‘What terms?’ said Puck quickly. ‘The Fortieth of the Great Charter says: “To none will we sell, refuse, or delay right or justice.”‘

‘True, but the Barons had written first: To no free man. It cost me two hundred broad pieces of gold to change those narrow words. Langton, the priest, understood. “Jew though thou art,” said he, “the change is just, and if ever Christian and Jew came to be equal in England thy people may thank thee.” Then he went out stealthily, as men do who deal with Israel by night.

Kipling’s fiction is a fantasy, but reminds us that the greatest of legislative texts are still the products of the grubby political sausage factory. We shall never know what deals were struck to get that 40th article. We do know a little more about Article 2 of the Paris Agreement. The WAPO and the Guardian between them offer a credible account.

First, the small island nations have been highly focused on the demand. They worked with climate scientists and 350.org, the NGO created to push James Hansen’s proposal to return atmospheric CO2 to well below current levels. They secured credible studies put on the table showing the difference between 2 degrees and 1.5 degrees, which is at the outer limit of what is technically achievable. 1.5 degrees made it into the early working drafts of the agreement as one of the thousands of options, and there it stayed till the conference.

Second, they won round the French hosts: Hollande proposed it in his opening speech. In such huge meetings, the chair’s power of controlling the flow of documents and orchestrating the side-meetings is greater than in a smaller group. Fabius had a high-tech control room at his disposal with live feeds from all the meeting rooms, next-door offices to the secretariat, a team of 60, and a 20-bed private dormitory, so his troops were always that bit fresher.

The key manoeuvre came in the middle of the week. The G77 alliance of developing countries, led by China, India and South Africa, was demanding more and more language on differentiated responsibilities, to the extent of effectively going back to the disastrous Kyoto principle that only rich countries had to cut; more finance than the $100 bn a year promised in Copenhagen; and language on loss and damage that was unacceptably strong to the rich countries. However, the alliance was divided on the 1.5 degree aspiration, with the big four - China, India, South Africa and Brazil - against it.

This opened the door for a well executed diplomatic wedge.  Tony de Brum of the Marshall Islands took the lead (at somebody’s suggestion, no telling whose) in forming a “coalition of high ambition”, including many of the G77 plus the EU, the USA, Canada and Australia. In effect, the rich countries offered 1.5 degrees to split the G77 and isolate the big four. The poor countries on their side had to drop the demands on differentiation and finance; on loss and damage, the difference seems to have been split - but crucially with no admission of legal liability (Decision, paragraph 52). Before the end, Brazil jumped ship too. Their troops having deserted to the enemy, China, India and South Africa folded, and the way was open for the deal.

Joyeux Noël

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They did it. We have a Paris Agreement. The text was released a few minutes ago as the President’s final proposal. The vibes do not suggest any last-minute objections, which would probably be suicidal as everybody else in the room desperately wants to get some sleep and go home.

Update 1750h Paris time: Adopted. Final version here. I don’t know what changes were made at the last minute to get holdouts on board, but they didn’t affect the articles quoted below.(/update)

The key takeaways are unchanged since Thursday.

The temperature goal (Article 2.1.a)

… holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.

Decarbonisation goal (Article 4.1) :

In order to achieve the long-term temperature goal set out in Article 2, Parties aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, recognizing that peaking will take longer for developing country Parties, and to undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with best available science, so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century, on the basis of equity, and in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty.

Review timetable (Article 14(2):

The Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement shall undertake its first global stocktake in 2023 and every five years thereafter unless otherwise decided by the Conference of the Parties …

Opening for signature party in New York on April 22 next year (Decision paragraph 3). Presumably President Obama will invite all the Republican presidential hopefuls still standing, to gnash their teeth in frustrated isolation.

What we have is not the solution but an international framework for benchmarking everybody’s efforts. Continue Reading…

A grown-up talks to grown-ups about ISIL

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What we saw on TV this evening was the product as advertised: No Drama Obama. The President said what had to be said. We need, he told us, to do measured, reasoned things to defend ourselves at home and abroad, and one of  them is cultivating a split between the radical Islamic fringe and the mass of Muslims.

This is the basic point that divides Obama from Trump and Cruz and Rubio and everyone in the 101st Chairborne Division who insists that Obama say “Islamic terrorism.” Really, it’s not hard to see that when it comes to Christianity: those of us who aren’t Christians want Christians to disavow Junior Falwell and the Westboro Baptist Church and that Bible-thumper who just shot up the Planned Parenthood clinic, and we know we can’t achieve that by insisting that every lunatic who has a cross at home or a pulpit to pound, and kills someone or makes speeches full of hatred, demonstrates that Christianity, as such, is evil.

By the same token, putting massive numbers of U.S. troops on the ground in Syria would be to follow the fox into the briarpatch. That, after all, is the great lesson of the Iraqi adventure. (As  @Lib_Librarian - not otherwise known to me - Tweeted, “You know the stupid thing we did before? Which got us in this mess? Yeah, let’s try to avoid that this time.”)  “Not doing stupid sh*t” isn’t an emotionally satisfying foreign policy principle, but it beats the alternative all hollow.

But in some ways the tone of the speech was even more important than the substance. The President made his case with logical force but without dramatic passion. No anger. No shouting. He addressed us as a grown-up talking to other grown-ups about a difficult situation, not an adolescent gangbanger egging his homies on to some act of emotionally satisfying, but disastrous, retaliatory violence.

What Barack Obama’s fans love about him is precisely what the Red Team hates: his sanity. Unlike Trump, he doesn’t appeal to people who want a leader to express their rage for them and make them feel righteous about it: An Angry-Drunk-in-Chief.

What we need most, at this moment, is courage: the courage, as the President said yesterday, not to be terrorized, not to give the terrorists the power that only we can give them, by letting them bait us into folly, like stallion driven mad by a horsefly.

What I felt when the speech was over was a mixture of gratitude and pride: gratitude that we are being led by someone who prefers accuracy to dramatic passion, and pride, as both a Democrat and an American, at having a leader worth following.

Footnote  Given that being placed on the “no-fly” list means that, if you’re an American citizen abroad, you’re effectively stranded there, a virtual exile, Obama’s argument that someone dangerous enough to be on that list shouldn’t be able to acquire an arsenal seems reasonably sound. On the other hand, the objection that people are put on the list without due process, and have no effective recourse once they’re on it, also seems cogent. So how about we compromise: Give everyone on the no-fly list full notice and an opportunity to be heard and represented, and extend the consequences of being on that list to not being able to buy weaponry?

 

 

 

COP21 tracking

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Random jottings follow. I’m not going to try to follow the jamboree systematically, just a few things I spot related to my checklist here.
I left out the 5-year timetable for the review, on the assumption that it’s a done deal (Hollande got the Chinese to sign up beforehand).

November 30
François Hollande:

The first is that we need to sketch out a credible path allowing us to limit global warming to below 2C, or 1.5C if possible.

So Fabius will do his considerable best to keep 1.5C in. A good sign.

November 30 - bis
The group photo. It’s a commercial press photo site, and I couldn’t download the image.
I reckon this photo locks them all in. None can afford to be identified later as the holdout blocking the agreement.

December 1
Statements by leaders on the conference website, filling up slowly.
Turnbull, Australia: Positive tone. Promise of $1bn in climate aid, but “from our existing aid budget”. “We will meet and beat our 2020 emissions reduction target”. Shout-out to Martin Green’s solar research at UNSW. I imagine his research funding is secure.
A link to Modi’s statement, but it doesn’t work for me.

December 1 - bis
There seems to be a surprising amount of corridor talk in favour of a carbon tax: eg Obama, Bachelet of Chile. Perhaps enough to get a serious plan on the agenda in five years’ time, or earlier in regional and subnational groups. Update 3/12: James Hansen, five eminent economists.

December 2
Xi Jinping’s statement, video with English interpretation (so not a vetted translation). No update to the INDC offer, but indications of new and even stronger policies in the next Five-Year Plan. Standard language in favour of differentiated responsibilities, respect for national differences, right to develop, etc but a long way from endorsement of Modi’s climate justice rhetoric. Instead “win-win cooperation”.

December 3
Modi’s text. As expected, no concessions, but no threats to derail. The climate justice rhetoric of the INDC has been toned down, for lack of allies: having Venezuela say on your side doesn’t help. An astonishing error: “By 2030, we will reduce emissions by 33-35% of 2005 level.” The INDC undertaking (pdf, page 29) is in fact to lower emissions intensity by these percentages: absolute emissions will still grow, that’s the problem. Lie or carelessness?

December 3
The real negotiations are taking place in a diplomatic black hole. Meanwhile the rest of us are offered distracting side-events. The most significant to me is the joint statement of the development banks, promising to increase climate-related lending. The EIB alone will up its lending to over $22bn a year, a fifth of the $100bn Copenhagen promise. This is real money. The LDCs are not going to scupper the Paris agreement because pledges fall a bit short of $100bn and McConnell throws a spanner in the US contribution to the pot. Remember that wind and solar farms are about the easiest sort of project imaginable to a development bank: technological risk zero, planning risk negligible (unlike dams), repayment risk low (the customers are tied to a monopoly grid and can be disconnected if they don’t pay for an essential and affordable service), political risk as low as it gets (the projects are popular everywhere).

We also have India’s Solar Alliance: a pure displacement activity to distract attention from India’s obnoxious coal-burning plans. It’s harmless, also pointless - what the members need is technology and finance, which they can’t get from each other. As a policy shop, it duplicates IRENA.

Then there is the “Breakthrough Energy Coalition” of Silicon Valley billionaires promising to throw vast sums of their money at reinventing the wheel, following Bjorn Lomborg’s deluded cargo cult. Again, it won’t actually do any harm. Both Joe Romm and the Giant Vampire Squid agree that this is rubbish and the overwhelming need is simply deployment of the technologies we already have. One is irresistibly reminded of Samuel Johnson’s celebrated smackdown of the Earl of Chesterfield’s last-minute offer to be patron of his great Dictionary:

Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it: till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it.

December 5
We have a new negotiating text: on time and of reasonable length (21 pages), both good signs. The good news:

  • 1.5.dec C is still in. Article 2(a):”To hold the increase in the global average temperature [below 1.5 °C] [or] [well below 2 °C] above pre-industrial levels by ensuring deep reductions in global greenhouse gas [net] emissions”. This is an astonishing victory for Jim Hansen (though typically he’s being complaining instead about the lack of a carbon tax). Even the weaker formulation is a big step forward from Copenhagen’s 2 deg C, and probably commits the parties to large-scale sequestration.
  • The 5-year review looks solid, though apparently Saudi Arabia has been trying to derail it. Article 10(2): “The CMA shall undertake its first global stocktake in 2024 and every five years thereafter unless otherwise decided by the CMA.” No square brackets indicating dissent.
  • The US has got its way on the binding/non-binding split. The goal and mechanism are legally binding, the national commitments only politically.
  • It’s not very important, but we have a date and place for Obama’s victory lap. Article 16(1): “[This Agreement] .. shall be open for signature at the United Nations Headquarters in New York from 22 April 2016 to 21 April 2017.” No square brackets, 22 April it is.

The bad news:

  • The decarbonisation goal is still all at sea. Article 3 is a forest of square brackets.
    “[Parties [collectively][cooperatively] aim to reach the global temperature goal referred to in Article 2 through:
    (a) [A peaking of global greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible[, recognizing that peaking requires deeper cuts of emissions of developed countries and will be longer for developing countries]]
    (b) [Rapid reductions thereafter [in accordance with best available science] to at least a X [-Y] per cent reduction in global [greenhouse gas emissions][CO2 [e]] compared to 20XX levels by 2050]];
    (c) [Achieving zero global GHG emissions by 2060-2080]
    (d) [A long-term low emissions transformation] [toward [climate neutrality][decarbonization] [over the course of this century] [as soon as possible after mid-century];
    (e) [Equitable distribution of a global carbon budget based on historical responsibilities and [climate] justice].”

Paragraph (e) is in contradiction with the basis voluntarist architecture of the agreement, and stands no chance. However it would be a nice miracle if we got “decarbonisation as soon as possible after mid-century” or “Achieving zero global GHG emissions by 2060-2080”. Either are of course still incompatible with a 1.5 deg C target.

  • Pages and pages of square brackets over finance, the principal topic of disagreement. I am resolutely optimistic here. The developing countries will make a huge fuss to the last minute, trying to get rich countries to improve their offer. But in the end they know that texts don’t generate money, and will take the rich countries’ final offer.

December 10

Latest draft here. 1.5deg C is still in the running. The central option is “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels”, with 1.5 deg C as an optional aspiration, so I suppose this is the likeliest language. However, decarbonisation “as soon as possible after mid-century” has disappeared in favour of the less ambitious “over the course of this century informed by best available science”. Never mind that this slow pace is inconsistent wit the temperature goal.

It’s now a “President’s proposal”. At this stage exhaustion gravitates power to the chair.  Down to 14 pages, but there are still dozens of options. It is impossible for outsiders - and possibly insiders - to predict the outcome of all this in detail. But the initial take holds: if there is an agreement, it will be sort-of OK, and confessedly no more, but still a true global deal and (variable) commitment.

Note for aficionados. COP2 doesn’t have “breakout groups”, it has “indabas” (Zulu and/or Xhosa term for a big tribal council). I fear they have cut the drums and dancing, which would be an improvement on PowerPoint slides.

Update 12 December There is content to the indaba format. /update

India have offered to scale back their (in any case unrealistic) plans for expanding coal burning, in exchange for cheap finance.  This is for bargaining after Paris.

The Tyndall Centre at UEA in Norwich have released a forecast that global carbon emissions from fossil fuels will drop 0.6% in 2015 (central estimate, range +0.5% to -1.6%). Separate post planned.

December 10 - bis

A chart from NGO tracking site parisagreement.org shows the slow death of the square brackets:

dec-9-agreement-brackets-graph-v2-620x363

This is what a deal looks like. The French will release a new draft around midnight, then for another all-nighter. And right-wingers think that civil servants and politicians don’t work hard.

December 10- ter - Stop press

They were quicker: here it is. The square brackets are an endangered species.

Temperature goal: ” … hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C ..”

Decarbonisation goal: “Parties aim to reach the peaking of greenhouse house gas emissions as soon as possible, recognizing that peaking will take longer for developing country Parties, and to undertake rapid reductions thereafter towards reaching greenhouse gas emissions neutrality in the second half of the century..”

No brackets in these articles. These are good results, much better than I had expected.