COP25 Convenes in Madrid to Finalize Rules on the Paris Agreement
Signatories of the Paris agreement met in Madrid Tuesday for a two week UN summit that aims to finalize plans for tackling climate change.
Good morning and welcome back from Thanksgiving, which fell on Thursday last week and knocked The Loop off its regular publishing schedule.
We’re back just in time. The COP25 is meeting in Madrid this week, having been diverted from Santiago by protests. The sudden change of venue was one of a few bad omens that preceded the meeting.
Last week, the United Nations Environment Programme released a report indicating that the objective of the Paris Agreement to limit global temperature increases over the remainder of the century to just 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels will likely be missed. The EU, which declared a climate emergency last week, reported it will likely miss its 2030 reduction targets, too.
No wonder UN Secretary General Antonió Guterres opened the COP25 session on Tuesday by chastising the world leaders for not having done enough to tackle climate change since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2016.
“Do we want to be remembered as the generation that buried its head in the sand and fiddled as the planet burned?” Guterres asked, telling the heads of state that COP25 is an opportunity for governments to “get on the right path.”
Despite his stern words, Guterres seems optimistic that the EU will still be a leader in tackling climate change, telling the COP25 summit he is “convinced” that Europe will be in a position to negotiate with China, India, the United States, and other major polluters to get them on board with tackling climate change.
But China and the E.U. were at loggerheads just last week as China pushed back against E.U. plans to enact a so-called carbon border tax—a duty levied on imports from countries that aren’t meeting climate targets. China argued such a move would damage attempts to tackle climate change and called the tax climate protectionism—which sounds like a good thing, actually.
Now in Madrid, the Paris signatories are tasked with hashing out two remaining issues of the Paris Agreement—specifically whether it’s feasible to have a common timeframe for all countries to implement their climate change battle plans and how to implement Article 6, which calls for an international cap and trade carbon market.
Not everyone is in favor of Article 6. Critics say could derail the entire Paris Agreement if nations game the system by under-promising and over-delivering on emission targets, earning rewards for surpassing their goals.
Resolving Article 6, which was the last component of the Paris Agreement to be agreed to in principle in 2015, will be a tricky operation. The COP25 concludes on December 13 next week. Stay tuned.
Eamon Barrett
Eamon.barrett@fortune.com
P.S. For those wondering, Greta Thunberg managed to make the voyage back across the Atlantic, landing in Lisbon on Monday. The young Swede is expected to attend a demonstration in Madrid tomorrow.