Author: Amos Frye

Today during a series of high level negotiations on article 6 of the Paris Agreement, I found the behavior of several of the delegations very interesting.

Firstly the behavior of the US delegation. The US delegation could not really be called the Trump delegation. The points they were making we’re well informed, reasonable, and in favor of the international climate regime in general. Further, the entire negotiating block that includes the US were perfectly aligned during the negotiations, and they coordinated a series of “interventions” where each member if the grouo reiterated their collective stance. I found this really interesting. Further it obviously frustrated some of the other groups, and this was brought up by the delegate from Tuvalu, who, without calling out the US by name, strongly rebuked the official stance of the US: “the United States will pull out of the Paris Agreement until such time that we can get a better deal for the American people.” This is directly at odds with the US and its allies dominating the negotiations on how to implement the paris agreement.

 

Today at the COP there was a joint SBSTA IPCC special event to discuss the findings in the most recent IPCC report. The event was held in the largest plenary room at the conference, and it was filled with both conference delegates and observers. I found the event on the whole very informative, and it was clear the effort the scientists were going to to present their results in a way that would assuage the apocalyptic descriptions of the report in the popular media after its release. I really enjoyed the data although I was left with some methodological questions, which I will research after recover from sleep deprivation. I also had the opportunity to ask a question to the panel, and I have never shaken so much in my life!

So the only side event I went to today was called ” Experience gained from the CDM” and in this talk I had my “market based solution” bone tickled for the first time at the conference. The biggest surprise from the talk was that the subject of the clean development mechanism, and the emissions credit market that existed in tandem with it, acted as a way of hedging currency related risks faced by green industry in developing countries. This is because many of these industries hold foreign loans, but their income is in domestic currency, so if there is a high risk premium associated with their domestic currency, paying a foreign loan may be much more difficult. The CDM, which facilitates the transfer of capital from developed to developing countries, gives these industries foreign currency, which they can use to insure they are able to pay off debts which are held in foreign currency. Hearing this discussed I found really really exciting, because I had never even thought this was a potential advantage of capital transfers between developed and developing countries.