The great Paris climate agreement enters into force.
As of today (7 October) 76 signatories have ratified the Paris Agreement, well over the 55 required. The European Union ratified on October 5th, along with seven of its member states (Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Malta, Portugal and Slovakia). Counting just these seven, that takes the percentage of declared emissions comfortably over the 55% required. The Agreement will therefore enter into force on November 4th, in time for the next assembly of the parties to the framework Rio treaty in Marrakesh, and also for the US elections.
This news will not change anybody’s assessment of the value of the Agreement. If it’s well-meaning hot air, entry ino force does not make it effective. But if like me you think it is an epochal achievement, entry into force - with nearly unprecedented speed, only the original UN Charter having been faster - is a historic moment.
Now for the work.
Author: James Wimberley
James Wimberley (b. 1946, an Englishman raised in the Channel Islands. three adult children) is a former career international bureaucrat with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. His main achievements there were the Lisbon Convention on recognition of qualifications and the Kosovo law on school education. He retired in 2006 to a little white house in Andalucia, His first wife Patricia Morris died in 2009 after a long illness. He remarried in 2011. to the former Brazilian TV actress Lu Mendonça. The cat overlords are now three.
I suppose I've been invited to join real scholars on the list because my skills, acquired in a decade of technical assistance work in eastern Europe, include being able to ask faux-naïf questions like the exotic Persians and Chinese of eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. So I'm quite comfortable in the role of country-cousin blogger with a European perspective. The other specialised skill I learnt was making toasts with a moral in the course of drunken Caucasian banquets. I'm open to expenses-paid offers to retell Noah the great Armenian and Columbus, the orange, and university reform in Georgia.
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No: now for the debate about what the work consists of, which will go on exactly forever.
The work to operate the Agreement is fully defined in the many articles nobody reads. The work to translate the national commitments into action has already begun. 158 GW of projected coal generating plants have disappeared from the global pipeline in six months. The ICAO has just adopted a voluntary carbon offset scheme for aviation - only a down payment, but aviation and shipping were not mentioned explicitly in the text, and thought they had escaped. This is what soft power looks like.
Amazing the EU has accomplished something at last — perhaps not as completely useless an organizatuon as is generally thought.