
Subscribe
After a week of negotiators working in "spin-off" groups, the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform (ADP) completed their work on Saturday with the final compilation of the Paris Outcome draft text officially transmitted to the COP, ready for ministerial negotiation beginning on Monday.
Typically, spirits in the plenary hall and meeting rooms rose and fell throughout the week. Friday began with reports of tension among delegates as they "frantically" reviewed the draft texts from the spin-off groups compiled overnight by the ADP co-chairs. With the Saturday deadline looming, talk of "ghosts of past COPs" remerged, particularly over fears of a loss of transparency in the text, with some delegates worried their main concerns would end up on the "bottom of the pile."
But Saturday dawned sunny in Paris, and with it the mood of the delegates. The tensions had morphed into a much more "harmonious mood," with reports of one delegate saying that parties has managed to "exorcise" the lack of transparency that shrouded negotiations in Copenhagen.
Thus in a relatively convivial mood, the ADP completed it four years of work began in Durban at COP17, handing over the draft text agreement to COP president Laurent Fabius.
Suh said the commitments codified in the proposed Paris Outcome point in "one direction and one direction alone...
"A clean energy revolution that is already attracting unprecedented levels of financing and entrepreneurialism around the world"
"I am optimistic that it will provide the momentum needed to cross the finish line with an agreement that puts us on a clear path to a sustainable, low carbon global future," said Luber.
'We will have some bickering," said Lubber, "some hand-wringing over the next several days. But I believe, based on everything we're seeing here, that the world is ready and the time is now."
"The debate is changing, the message is changing and the messengers are piling on, Lubber said. "When we were in Copenhagen it was about the environment. Here it is about the environment... but it is about health, it is about national security, and this is about the economy as well."
Indeed, COP21 looks nothing like COP15, where business, to the extent it was represented in Copenhagen, was outside, almost beside the point. In Paris it is cities, states, business and the private sector that inhabit Le Bourget in force, ready and willing to drive the conversation as negotiations move to the next level.
Right now it seems to me that, whatever the Paris Outcome is, the haunted halls of Copenhagen will remain quiet as the transformation takes shape takes shape here in Paris, even if kicking and screaming by some.
Image credit: Nicolas Bonnement, courtesy flickr
Tom is the founder, editor, and publisher of GlobalWarmingisReal.com and the TDS Environmental Media Network. He has been a contributor for Triple Pundit since 2007. Tom has also written for Slate, Earth911, the Pepsico Foundation, Cleantechnia, Planetsave, and many other sustainability-focused publications. He is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists