Two days after the Paris climate summit, I sat in an Airbus A330 and watched a tanker pump fuel into the plane. After all the visions of a post-carbon future, there in plain sight was the present reality of our dependence on fossil fuels.  

This is a longstanding paradox: Climate summits demand large quantities of the very energy sources they aim to curtail. Tens of thousands of participants fly from all corners of the world, leaving streams of heat-trapping emissions in their wake. Organizers have yet to tally COP21’s exact carbon footprint, but they estimate that the construction and dismantling of the site – along with local travel of attendees – will amount to 21,000 tons of CO2 equivalent.

Critics often use this to disparage global climate efforts, but participants understand the contradiction. “I’m not Alice in Wonderland,” UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres told the New Yorker earlier this year. “You and I are sitting here, in this gorgeous apartment, enjoying this fantastic privilege, because of fossil fuels.” It’s why COP21 attendees were given the opportunity to offset their climate impact, and summit organizers tick off multiple efforts to minimize emissions at the site itself. Ultimately, though, the idea is that you have to burn carbon to save carbon.

There on the tarmac, waiting to fly back home, the enormity of the challenge ahead was clear. The Paris Agreement requires that we “achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century.” In other words, every plane, car, train, ship, building, and power plant will have to be emissions-free. Either that, or we’ll have to rapidly scale up technology that captures and stores emissions from those and other sources.

What exactly will that look like? In a handful of decades, will I sit in a plane and watch as some ultra-dense, corn-based fuel is pumped into my jet? Or will batteries be compact enough to send a commercial airliner across the Atlantic Ocean? Might we have nuclear-powered planes like the uranium-fueled submarines we’ve already had for decades? Perhaps some yet unknowable energy technology will answer these and other questions.

In 1927, Charles Lindbergh made the very first solo flight across the Atlantic. He landed at Le Bourget Field, adjacent to the site of this year’s climate talks. It took 33 hours to travel from Long Island, cramped in a 220-horsepower, single-engine plane loaded with 400 gallons of gasoline. The historic flight demonstrated the possibilities of air travel and helped to launch the sprawling industry we take for granted today.  

“I was astonished at the effect my successful landing in France had on the nations of the world,” Mr. Lindbergh would later write. “To me, it was like a match lighting a bonfire.”  

Could Lindbergh have ever imagined the Airbus A330? Could he ever have pictured the ease with which we cross oceans today?

Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg probably come closest to being Charles Lindberghs of the 21st century. The two pilots are the brains behind the Solar Impulse, an experimental aircraft that runs only on the power of the sun. Earlier this year, they failed to complete the first flight around world without any fuel, after battery issues grounded their aircraft. Even Mr. Piccard and Mr. Borschberg admit their solar-powered plane is unlikely to revolutionize air travel. It takes too many solar panels to match the thrust created by 37,000 gallons of kerosene. Instead, their intent is to show off what renewable energy is capable of.

Still, who knows? If the world fulfills the promise of the Paris Agreement, something other than heavily-processed oil will have to power our planes. Say what you will about fossil fuels, they are very good at moving humans from point A to point B. That’s what makes them so very hard to shake.

In a March interview with CNBC, Piccard recalled his earlier experience circumventing the globe in a hot air balloon fueled by propane gas. When the balloon finally landed, he said, it had only 40 kilograms of liquid propane out of the 3.7 tonnes it started with.

“At this moment, I really understood what it means to be dependent on fossil energy, and I made the promise that the next time I would fly around the world it would be with no fuel at all, to be able to be free to fly forever,” he told CNBC. “Actually this is how Solar Impulse was born, the idea really is to fly day and night with no fuel with an unlimited perpetual endurance.”     

– David J. Unger   

Only the final version of the Paris agreement ultimately counts, but how that final version took shape reveals a lot. Looking at the process behind the product sheds light on what kinds of conversations took place in closed-doors negotiations. What options were put on the table, which remained, and which were left on the proverbial cutting room floor?

Article 2 of the Paris Agreement provides a useful case study. In this section, authors of the Paris Agreement attempt to define its very raison d’être. What is the purpose of this text? Why does this agreement even need to exist? The slideshow below shows how even this basic question gave negotiators plenty to debate.

Use the arrows on the side of the text to navigate through different versions over the course of the summit. It begins with the first draft text prepared by negotiators in the first week at Le Bourget. It then proceeds through high-level negotiations in week 2 and ends up with the final version adopted on Dec. 12. Deletions are in red strikethroughs, and additions are in red underlines.

– David J. Unger

At roughly 7:26 pm Paris time – after a quibble over “shall” vs. “should” language in the text – French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius quickly gaveled through the adoption of the Paris Agreement.

You can read the final text here: Paris Agreement

You can read the full CSMonitor.com story here: Rich and poor nations agree to first-ever global climate deal  

– David J. Unger

The final(?) draft Paris climate agreement is available here.

Ministers are largely expected to approve the agreement at a meeting scheduled for 5:30 pm Paris time. Given there may be some last minute nit picking and showy speeches, we may not hear the final gavel fall until late Saturday night, or perhaps even early Sunday.

As it stands now, the text seeks to keep rising temperatures to well below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and to “pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase” to 1.5 degrees Celsius. It provides billions in financing for cleaner energy and adaptations in developing countries, and it requires that nations return to the negotiating table every five years beginning in 2018 to assess progress and strengthen goals.

It’s a bit more fuzzy on exactly how quickly the world should move to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. And it doesn’t provide the details on finance that some would have liked to see.

Still, much of the reaction to the text here has been positive. In general, observers say it sends a very strong signal, even if the specific details don’t necessarily follow through at every point.

“It will represent a historic turning point in the global effort to address climate change,” David Waskow, director of the international climate initiative at World Resources Institute, a Washington-based think tank, tells me. “We knew coming in to Paris that there are 185 countries ready to take action. What they’ve done here is made clear that they not only have national climate plans in place now, but are prepared to continue moving forward, building on that momentum.”

– David J. Unger

It appears the end of the Paris climate summit is near.

In a rousing speech Saturday, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told delegates that negotiations had produced “a balanced text” that “contains the principle elements.” He was joined by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and French President Francois Hollande in commending negotiators for their around-the-clock work over the past two weeks.

The final text will be presented no later than 1:30 pm Paris time, Mr. Fabius told gathered delegates. At 3:45 pm, parties will reconvene for what is presumably the final meeting.    

“Today we are close to the final outcome,” Fabius said. “It is my deep conviction that we have come up with an ambitious and balanced agreement which reflects the positions of the parties.”

Multiple sources and news reports suggest the final agreement is as ambitious, if not more so, than the current draft text. That would mean a temperature target that stays well below 2 degrees C and even reaches for 1.5 degrees C. It would also mean a significant boost in climate financing for developing countries, and a five-year cycle for reviewing national climate pledges.

During Saturday’s meeting, Fabius implored delegates to set aside individual positions and opt instead for universal commitments.   

“In this room you are going to be deciding upon a historic agreement,” Fabius said, his words translated into English by an interpreter whose voice quavered. “The world is holding its breath. It counts on all of us.”

– David J. Unger

As negotiators in Paris miss their deadline for delivering an international climate agreement, the rest of the world is preparing for a warmer world.

The US Department of Defense, for example, finds itself literally on the front lines of climate change.

“Climate change is a risk, and the DoD does one thing really well: We prepare for risks,” said Maureen Sullivan, deputy assistant secretary for environment, safety, and occupational health, during an event in Washington organized by the American Security Project.

DoD says it is working to integrate climate change awareness into all of its decision-making processes in recognition of the national-security threat of a changing climate.

That will impact everything from where bases are built to how the US Army works with local communities on issues like water management. Military officials also say that a scarcity of natural resources brought on by global warming can spur social unrest and fuel extremism around the world.

“You can certainly tie Syria to climate change,” Brig. Gen. Stephen Cheney (ret.) said during the event. “And Boko Haram – Lake Chad is drying up.” Other panelists agreed that ISIS and climate change aren’t necessarily independent of one another.

Overall, officials stressed a need to prepare for the future. If the DoD is investing in airplanes and facilities that will last 100 years, it wants to know those investments will still be viable in a warming world.

When asked whether the DoD was prepared for global temperatures to rise higher than 2 degrees C above preindustrial levels, Ms. Sullivan replied:

“Getting tied to a specific number will hamper us. We need to look at the whole range of temperatures and be prepared.”

US military officials said they are hoping for a positive outcome from Paris. But in the meantime they are switching to biofuel-powered aircrafts and adopting solar power in military bases.   

-Cristina Maza

It’s oddly quiet in Le Bourget today. On the last official day of talks there is little in the way of formal negotiations or announcements. Negotiators are behind closed doors making decisions that cut to the bone. We’ve got official word that talks will continue into Saturday. That’s not surprising, but it is a sign that despite all the momentum and unity, COP21 is no cakewalk.

The latest draft – presumably the penultimate – came late last night Paris time, after a series of delays. Much has been clarified, and the amount of unconfirmed language, designated by brackets, has dropped dramatically. ParisAgreement.org, a media platform sponsored by the non-profit Tropical Forest Group, has a great tool tracking quantifiable shifts in the text over time. Here’s their updated chart:

That’s measurable progress in technocratic terms. Qualitatively, however, some of the toughest issues still remain. Exactly how much developed nations spend on climate finance is perhaps the greatest sticking point, and the latest draft leaves a lot of unresolved:

Meanwhile, a panel of scientists criticized inconsistencies in the text at a packed briefing today. Their primary concern is the gap between stated temperature targets and the proposed strategies for meeting those targets. On one hand, the latest draft solidifies a target of keeping warming within 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and even advocates “pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C.” On the other hand, the draft relies on national climate pledges (INDCs) that put the world on a path closer to a 3-degree rise in temperatures.

“By the time the pledges enter into force by 2020, we will have probably exhausted the entire carbon budget for the 1.5 degree target,” Steffen Kallbekken, research director at Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, Norway, told the overcrowded room.

The International Council for Science, which organized the panel, summed it up in a tweet, citing environmental scientist Johan Rockström:

In other words, the current draft is politically ambitious but scientifically inconsistent. The next – and presumably final – draft is expected at 9:00 am Paris time tomorrow.

– David J. Unger

A theme of this year’s climate talks is that no one summit can fix climate change. Each set of negotiations is a step in a broader process aimed at enhancing climate ambition. That may sound like mere political cover to manage expectations, and perhaps, to an extent, it is. But there is evidence that backs up the idea that summits are just one (critical) part of a feedback loop between policy, research, and the private sector.

Case in point: a recent report out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that explains how reducing greenhouse gas emissions could make it less expensive to cut more emissions in the future. In a guest post for the Monitor, lead author Jessika Trancik explains how climate policy has helped to drive down the price of renewable energy sources:

In the case of solar and wind energy, market growth was largely driven by government policies to reward emission-reducing technologies, but it unleashed the ingenuity of private companies in research, and in achieving economies of scale and greater productivity.

Individual pledges to reduce carbon emissions even further could help spur innovation and expand the capacity of renewables energy sources to meet our energy needs. Here’s Trancik again:

[M]y colleagues and I estimate that the solar and wind power capacity installed globally could grow by factors of nearly five and three, respectively, between now and 2030. As markets expand, costs are expected to drop further, by up to 50 percent and 25 percent for solar and wind, allowing these technologies to increasingly compete with coal and natural gas.

Read Trancik’s piece in the Monitor here: The hidden virtuous cycle of Paris climate pledges

Or, better yet, check out the full report: Technology improvement and emissions reductions as mutually reinforcing efforts: Observations from the global development of solar and wind energy     

- Cristina Maza

The soul of the Paris climate agreement – the 158 voluntary pledges on climate action already submitted to the UN – is likely to fall outside the bounds of traditional legal force.

There’s a lot of handwringing about that. How can an agreement have any impact if there’s no punishment for failing to meet the terms?

It’s a fair question, but there’s a sense here in Le Bourget that the decentralized, non-binding approach is exactly what has brought so much weight and value to this year’s summit. Officials aim to bring more parties to the table, even if it’s at the expense of legal enforcement. Rather than be bound to a paper text, countries are instead bound to one another.  

Elliot Diringer, executive vice president of the Washington-based Center for Climate and Energy Solutions explains it like this:

In effect, what you’re creating is a system of institutionalized peer pressure. We see it working already. The mere expectation that countries offer up contributions has led to this tremendous surge without a single word of the agreement being agreed.

Some would still prefer more stick to match the carrot, but my latest piece explores why so many are increasingly comfortable with prioritizing inclusion over enforcement.

Read the full piece here: Paris climate pledges won’t be legally binding. Why that’s ok.

– David J. Unger

... until everything is agreed upon.

That’s a phrase you’ll hear often in Le Bourget as negotiations enter their final stretch. What it means is that each constituent part of a climate agreement influences and is influenced by its other constituent parts.

“You can’t have one issue racing ahead of the others, and being resolved before others, because they’re all linked,” says Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists. You can’t decide on climate finance, for example, without also figuring out what the long-term goal is.

The latest “clean” text, released Wednesday afternoon, sets the table for a final push that ties everything together. There’s a general sense of optimism and agreement here. Typically by this point in negotiations, there’s at least one stormy walkout or other sign of high-level interpersonal drama. Not here in Paris. Not yet, at least.

Of course, there’s plenty that could still go wrong. Oil-rich nations are uneasy about language that pushes the world closer to a target of 1.5 degrees C warming above pre-industrial levels. Developing nations are still skeptical of pledges to provide financial aid for clean energy and climate adaptation. The US is pushing for more transparent and more frequent reviews of national climate pledges. What’s more, current climate pledges still would allow for a rise in global temperatures that scientists say is dangerous.

“At the utmost, this has to be a floor from which we very, very, very quickly escalate,” says Bill McKibben, a longtime climate activist and cofounder of environmental group 350.org.

Still, for at least a moment yesterday, all eyes at Le Bourget fixed on a rousing speech from US Secretary of State John Kerry. It’s just a speech of course, but it certainly seemed to electrify and focus those watching. Here’s Mr. Kerry:  

And while each nation must make its own decision, this is not a decision just about each nation. It’s about all of us and about the future of the home that we share.

Our task is clear. Our moment is now. Let’s get this job done.

– David J. Unger

We’re waiting here in Le Bourget for a new, cleaner (read: less-bracketed) draft agreement to come out, supposedly at 1pm Paris time. In the quiet before the storm, I fell down an Internet rabbit hole combing through the Monitor’s long history of covering big climate summits like this one.

The Monitor was there at the original ‘92 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the Hague in 2000, Copenhagen in 2009, and any number of other Conferences of the Parties.

Combing through all these dispatches is a humbling reminder that Paris is one small paragraph in the long Russian novel that is international climate summitry. It’s also a reminder that scientists and policymakers have been fairly certain about the severity of climate threats for a long time, and yet have struggled to address them on a global scale.

Here are just a few highlights I could dig up from the Monitor archives, via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine:

Humanity in the Hothouse
by Pete Spotts • November 2000
This ahead-of-its-time online package was a source of inspiration for the Paris microsite you’re currently visiting. Pete Spotts tackled the 2000 talks (which ultimately fell apart) in The Hague using a reporter’s-notebook approach that took readers behind the scenes:  

‘Kyoto’ era begins
by Brad Knickerbocker • February 16, 2005
Major powers would ultimately abandon the Kyoto Protocol, but the world’s first major climate treaty provided some key lessons for world leaders. Here Brad Knickerbocker covers the moment the protocol entered into force:

Copenhagen summit: Major powers broker compromise voluntary climate pact
by Pete Spotts • Dec. 18, 2009
Many labeled Copenhagen a failure, but, as Pete Spotts presciently reported at the time, the 2009 summit laid the groundwork for a US-China partnership that has transformed global climate dynamics. Without cooperation between the world’s two largest polluters and economies, it is unlikely there would be so much momentum here at this year’s Paris summit:

– David J. Unger

Week 2 of negotiations here at Le Bourget is when the ministers come to town. Environment ministers, foreign ministers, and other heads of delegations take the draft agreement submitted to the UN Saturday and turn it into what many hope will be a transformational plan for curbing emissions in a post-Kyoto-Protocol world.

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN’s climate arm, did not mince words in addressing these high-level delegates Monday:

It is now up to you to exercise your political stewardship to ensure we give to the world a global agreement that is a catalyst for meeting national and local needs and lives up to the scientific imperatives of environmental integrity.

It is now up to you to deliver an agreement that safeguards the most vulnerable and unleashes the full force of human ingenuity toward prosperity for all, as the centerpiece for a sustainable future.

No pressure.

There’s still a lot of issues to be worked out, and together they represent the very core issues that have long dogged global climate agreements. To help bridge persistent divides, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius has assigned specific ministers to report back on progress (or lack thereof) on four core issues. Those issues are organized into themes and, in layman’s terms, can be posed as questions:

1. Implementation: What technologies will make the Paris agreement a reality, and who will pay for them?
   
   
2. Differentiation: To what extent should countries be treated differently depending on their economic wealth? Should poorer countries be given special treatment because they did little to contribute to climate change and are the least equipped to deal with it?
   
   
3. Ambition: How aggressive should the agreement be? Should it aim to keep warming within 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, or should it push even further and aim for a 1.5-degree target?
   
   
4. Acceleration: How frequently should countries come back to the negotiating table to reassess and redouble their climate efforts? And when should that pledge-and-review process begin?

A wide range of answers to these questions – satisfying a wide range of interests – remains in the draft agreement. It’s up to the ministers with the pens to decide ultimately what stays and what goes.

Here’s Ms. Figueres again, addressing the ministers Monday:

Dear friends, the opportunity to rise to the call of history is not given to everyone, or every day. History has chosen you, here, now.

I am often asked what keeps me up at night. Here is what keeps me up. I see seven sets of eyes of seven generations beyond me asking me, 'What did you do? What did you do?' The same question will be asked of each of you.

May we all be able to stand tall and clearly say, 'We did everything that was necessary.'

– David J. Unger

Some well-timed good news: Just as climate negotiations enter their final week, new research suggests global efforts to curb climate change are paying off.

The release of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and from other industries have slowed “dramatically,” perhaps reversing a trend of rapid growth in the last couple of decades.

Reduced coal use in China is largely responsible for the decline, say scientists in a December 7 column in the journal Nature Climate Change.

But they caution that it will take more time to tell if this is just a temporary blip or a budding trend resulting from years of hard work around the world.

“I will take the blip any day; it’s much better than saying it’s increasing,” US Environmental Protection Administrator Gina McCarthy told the Associated Press at the climate talks in Paris.

“But,” she added, “I think it may just represent a strategy that will be more long term.”

There have been other periods of low to zero growth in emissions, the research team points out.

They have coincided with shrinking economies during the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the US dotcom bust in the early 2000s, and during the recent global financial crisis.

But what makes the last couple of years most “unusual,” they say, is that emissions are declining while the global economy is actually growing.  

Why?

For one, demand for oil and natural gas has shrunk, while the use of renewable energy has grown dramatically. The capacity of solar installations has exploded, from 3.7 gigawatts in 2004 to 178 gigawatts in 2014. Just in the last year, 40 gigawatts worth of solar-powered energy production was installed around the world.

The most important contribution to a decline in global carbon emissions, through, is from China.

It is the world’s largest producer of wind energy, and it’s using less coal, the authors say. Though how much less has recently been a subject of great controversy when news broke that China, also the world’s largest CO2emitter, had been burning up to 17 percent more coal a year than its government had disclosed.

But it has released revised data, which the study’s authors – from the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Norway, and Austria – used for their assessment. They project that Chinese carbon emissions will fall by 3.9 percent in 2015, which beats the small rise of 1.9 percent in emissions the group estimated for the country in 2014, and, in comparison, the significant rise of 6.7 percent a year for the decade before that.

Globally, based on data from June to October, the authors estimate emissions will decline by .6 percent this year, an improvement from last year, when they increased by that same amount, and from the decade before that, when they grew by 2.4 percent a year.

– Lonnie Shekhtman

Global climate agreements are built on the back of energy innovation. Without the technology needed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, it is impossible for world leaders to follow through on the bold pledges they make in speeches and declarations. Deals may be cut in the negotiating room, but the real progress happens in the laboratory and on the factory floor.

US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz knows this well. The nuclear physicist and former head of the MIT Energy Initiative is in Paris this week as the 2015 UN climate summit enters its final, high-level segment in suburban Le Bourget. He’s here largely to promote Mission Innovation, an initiative launched last Monday by the US and 19 other countries aiming to accelerate the development of cleaner energy technologies. These countries, including China, France, and Saudi Arabia, have pledged to double public investment in clean energy innovation, collaborate on research, and share technology information across borders.

Additionally, the Mission Innovation nations will partner with the private sector via the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, also announced last week. Its operating principle can be distilled to a simple sentence: “Technology will help solve our energy issues.”

That’s a message Secretary Moniz can get behind. In an interview with The Christian Science Monitor Sunday morning, he discussed how Mission Innovation and his department’s work play into what nations put on the table during global climate talks.

The continued cost reduction of clean energy technologies “can be a foundation for increasing ambition as time goes on,” Moniz told the Monitor.

This conversation took place Sunday morning at the secretary’s hotel in the 16th arrondissement. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: There’s a lot of excitement, interest, and hope surrounding this agreement. What role has technology played in setting the table for that?

A: If you look at 2009, which was [the Copenhagen climate talks], we are now six years later, and, in those six years ... land-based wind, distributed [photovoltaics (PV)], utility-scale PV, electric-vehicle batteries, LEDs, have seen cost reductions of 40, 50, 60, 70, and 90 percent, [respectively]. So that is already a basis for more ambition now in 2015 than we could have seen in 2009. And that’s had material impacts.

For example, take the LEDs, with this incredible 90 percent reduction in cost. In the United States, we’ve had a sixfold deployment, in just two years – up to about 80 million. India has gone out with a 200 million LED mass purchase at a dollar per LED. That is going to transform a lot of people’s lives in rural India. So we are seeing these impacts. The idea is to amplify this dramatically globally over the next years, and, by the same token again, give countries hopefully a very optimistic view about what can happen as we get more and more ambitious in the years ahead.

Q: How can the Paris agreement ensure that clean-energy price curve continues downward? Is there enough in there to be supportive of basic research into the next-generation breakthrough technologies?

A: Well I don’t think the agreement, per se ... is what’s going to establish that. I think it’s more the other way around ... After all, we already have 20 countries [in Mission Innovation]. Those countries include essentially all the big players in this space. So we are talking about an increment of perhaps $10 billion a year starting in the fifth year in the innovation pipeline with the investors coming in – the Gates-led [Breakthrough Energy] Coalition. [They’re] not simply saying ‘we are putting billions on the table,’ but saying ‘we’re going to put it on the table with a real double bottom-line focus’ with – by investment standards – extraordinary patience and extraordinary risk tolerance. So I think this is really new on both sides, and they are highly synergistic.

Q: What is DOE or the US in general doing to share these technologies with other countries, particularly the least developed countries that are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change?

A: There’s going to be a variety of initiatives in the area of sharing. I think it’s very important that these increased R&D portfolios – the shaping of those R&D portfolios – will be at a national level, so this is not like some multilateral 20 countries pooling funds. Each country will do this individually. However, I have certainly in a number of discussions with other countries, emphasized that I can’t believe that, as we do this, more collaborations on specific technologies [won’t] come together.

The countries in the coalition all have a very different role in the energy world today. They are going to have presumably different portfolios. In Saudi Arabia, a great example of an area ripe for collaboration is resolving the technology issues around air conditioning for extremely hot environments. That is a major climate issue. So, I think there’s going to be more of that. And, in those cases, [intellectual property (IP)] arrangements will look just the way they do now, let’s say, as we’ve developed them with China in our clean-energy research center. It’s shared IP. So that’s one example.

I think we [in the Obama Administration] have shown innovation in how we manage government programs in technology development: the establishment of ARPA-e, the establishment of Energy Frontier Research Centers – two great examples of programs that are being very effective. Take ARPA-e, they do business in a very different way compared to the traditional programs. If you looked at the last data we put together at the end of 2014, 141 projects had been completed. They’re typically three-year projects. Of 141, 70 had received substantial follow-on funding from the private sector or from other government programs. Thirty companies [were] established, out of 141 projects. Now, that’s only an intermediate milestone, because the real milestone is, five more years down the road, which of those now 30 companies is going to have blossomed, shall we say? But that in itself is important, so we will also be working on innovation ecosystems.

We are also, with the White House ... we’ve established a whole set of investment relationships with the private sector, including energy investment portals. These are the kinds of things we can share with others. And of course, those investment activities, I would say are focused on major institutional investors, since you want to emphasize it now with the Breakthrough Energy Coalition that’s even pushing into another space with more patience and more risk tolerance than the traditional [investor]. So it’s going to be multi-dimensional. It will also clearly have a component of transparency in terms of what are investable opportunities with the investors. It’s going to be multi-faceted, and, frankly, it’s going to require more program design as we go forward, but we anticipate some meetings in the spring to get this going.

Q: When you look across that portfolio of technologies and different programs, what are some of the most promising technological solutions that you see on the horizon? What are you excited about?

A: Well, [laughs] I love all my children. And there are going to be lots of opportunities. I’ve always said in solar [there are] huge opportunities moving forward. Energy storage is obviously critical. But, let me also emphasize the breakthroughs, with major cost reductions, in carbon capture – huge – and carbon utilization. Up to now, CO2 utilization has been focused on one application: enhanced oil recovery. But now, we already have, especially with China, a program on enhanced water recovery with CO2.

Then if you go farther out, we have supported a big innovation hub around the idea of using CO2 plus sunlight plus water to make hydrocarbon drop-in fuels. It turns out, there’s no law of physics against that, but it is a hard and big challenge. But that’s an example of the big home run if we can break through on that. It’s going to be a whole spectrum, not to mention ... it’s not only CO2. For example, this question of hydrofluorocarbon replacement for air conditioning – very, very big deal. These portfolios are going to be shaped in different ways by different countries.

Q: Can you talk about the role nuclear will play, and how we bridge the public concern that sometimes pops up over nuclear?

A: If you go out to the demonstrations, the booths, there is one there on the NuScale modular reactors which is something we are supporting. That’s a case where they are moving. It’s a 50 megawatt reactor. Great safety features. They are moving to an [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] filing next year. So that’s something that with success could be material in the next decade.

Beyond that there are activities that go beyond light water technologies. Those are going to be farther out in terms of potential impact. Today, I would say they are higher risk in the sense that we don’t have the kind of foundation as we do for light water reactor technology. But in the United States, there are, now, almost 50 companies – kind of an untold story – with private investors in novel nuclear technologies, both fission and fusion. Now, to link back to Bill Gates, one of those is what Bill Gates is well known to be investing in in the last several years in terms of a novel nuclear technology – the TerraPower initiative.

So, again, we are very committed to the idea that all the pathways to low carbon, low greenhouse-gas emission – even beyond carbon, whether it’s methane, or hydrofluorocarbons – all of those are on the table. All of them are important. Not every country is interested in the entire portfolio, but the collection of countries, together, are interested in every part of the portfolio.

– Interview conducted by David J. Unger

As negotiators worked in Paris this week to finalize an international agreement to curb climate change, private companies have made it clear they want in on the action too.

Numerous companies have convened in Paris to pledge funds for the development of renewable energy, whose adoption experts say is imperative if global warming is to be stopped without harming global development. Google has long been a leader in investment in renewable energy, but now it’s opted to raise the stakes by pledging almost double what it originally promised.

“We’re really trying to lead this transition to a cleaner energy economy,” Michael Terrell, principal for energy and infrastructure at Google, told the New York Times. “It’s transforming anyone who touches the energy space.”

Recent deals will bring the amount of renewable energy Google purchases up to 2 gigawatts from 1.2, the Times reported. The company aims to get 100 percent of its power from renewable sources.

Investing in green energy isn’t just the right thing to do for the planet, argues former Vice President Al Gore. It’s also a smart investment move.

“Investors need to look at the pattern that is unfolding lest they be trapped holding stranded assets,” Gore told reporters and diplomats during the Paris climate conference.

As the price of renewables continues to drop faster than expected, it’s going to begin to compete with that of fossil fuels, Mr. Gore argued. Meanwhile, as people and governments realize the risks of global warming, some carbon companies risk losing their public license to operate. These developments present a strong argument for why investors should diversify away from fossil fuels and carbon-heavy companies, according to Gore.

Amazon web services, Dow Chemical, and Kaiser Permanente are among the other companies moving to increase their use of renewable energy sources.  

– Cristina Maza

Climate negotiations are essentially an exercise in very high-level, technocratic copy editing. Negotiators can negotiate until their blue in the face, but all that matters in the end is what shows up in the text agreement. Successive iterations of these draft texts come out throughout the summit, always resulting in a flurry of skimming and consternation. What was taken out? What was left in?

The drafts include menus of language options for their various composite sections. They make heavy use of brackets to indicate where debate over specific language persists. For example, is the long-term goal of the text to move the world toward “decarbonization” or “climate neutrality”? Or should it be framed as “a long-term low emissions transformation”? More ambitious countries might prefer it to read “equitable distribution of a global carbon budget based on historical responsibilities and climate justice.”

Here’s how negotiators try to suss that out in Article 3 from “Draft agreement and draft decision on workstreams 1 and 2 of the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action” version “of 4 December 2015@10.00” (not including the “Work of the ADP Contact Group incorporating bridging proposals by the Co-facilitators”):

Another key question: How should individual national climate pledges (abbreviated as INDCs) be treated in the final agreement? Take your pick:

And what about the poorest nations that are most exposed to climate change and yet least equipped to deal with it? Should they be treated any differently than other countries?

Today we got the second new draft since talks started here in Le Bourget. It’s four pages shorter than the last version. In the universe of bureaucracy, that counts as progress. Negotiators want to trim down the number of options and question marks so that ministers have fewer decisions they need to make when they finalize the agreement. Tomorrow (Saturday) is when they’re supposed to turn in that final (but-not-final) draft agreement, so there’s a lot of press conferences and brisk walking to-and-fro going on at Le Bourget today.

– David J. Unger

When it comes to international climate negotiations, the spotlight shines most brightly on superpowers – the US, Europe, China, and, increasingly, India. But one bloc of nations is increasingly influential as the effects of a warming planet become more readily apparent.

The Least Developed Countries (LDCs) are 48 nations identified by the United Nations as facing severe, structural obstacles toward sustainable development. They are the nations most vulnerable to climate change, yet they have contributed virtually nothing to the problem, and they are the least equipped to deal with the impacts.

Your correspondent in Paris spoke with the chair of the LDCs, Giza Gaspar Martins, on the sidelines of the Paris climate talks, where negotiators are finalizing an agreement to shape global efforts to curb climate change after current pledges expire in 2020. Mr. Martins is a longtime Angolan diplomat, elected to chair the LDCs at the Lima climate summit last year.

The conversation took place Thursday afternoon on an empty lot behind the conference site’s Hall 6, where Martins spent much of the day in closed-door meetings. The full exchange is transcribed below, lightly edited for clarity. For an overview of the technical, climate-negotiation terms used below, please see the French government’s glossary of terms or click the hyperlinked words and phrases.

Q: What do the LDCs want out of the Paris agreement?

A: A few things: Firstly, that we have an agreement that has the correct directional travel – that we set ourselves in the right direction. And to us, that directional travel is [greenhouse-gas emissions] mitigation-centric. We are asking for a temperature goal of 1.5 degrees [Celsius]. That has implications that follow on in the mitigation section, in the adaptation [to climate impacts] section, the types of finance [for sustainable development] that we need to put in place, the types of technology that we need to deploy and the types of assistance that needs to be given to those least capable to contribute to get us to that goal. That’s a sort of a guiding principle in our key asks.

A second big ask out of the agreement is that we recognize the fact that loss and damage is a real subject matter within the discourse of climate action. That’s another big feature.

The third one of course is that there is a recognition throughout the agreement of the special needs and circumstances of groups of countries such as the LDCs. You recognize that by the provision of finance, by the way in which that finance is provisioned. You do that by having special attention to the fact that we need to build the capacity of those countries in order to be able to participate – sometimes even to report on their participation, as well as on technology and on funding for adaptation. These are our three core asks.

Q: There was a lot of hype coming into the conference – lots of bold statements on day one from the heads of state. So far, do you see that translating into the negotiating room? Are we seeing the progress you want see?

A: Yes and no. In some areas, we are making a little bit of progress, but I have to tell you, we have a deadline of Saturday to deliver a draft text with very few political issues that could be the subject matter of negotiations at the high political level during the second week. But, at Thursday at 4pm, we’re not quite there, and we may be moving too slowly in some places where we could have been much further away.

But we understand this is a negotiation. Negotiations are taking place in probably 30 different rooms simultaneously. They are all linked together. There are negotiation strategies on parts of parties that all have a role in how fast and how slow we move. So we are fairly entangled, fairly stuck in many issues, but I’m confident that within the next few hours and tomorrow, we will be moving on where we are able to at our level – at the technical level.

Q: What parts of the agreement need to be legally binding from the perspective of the LDCs?

A: For our intents and purposes, the whole agreement needs to be legally binding.

Q: INDCs [individual country climate pledges] included?

A: INDCs are a must. And it’s just not INDCs ... there’s a little bit of a nuance there. We want a legally binding obligation on all parties to communicate INDCs, but also to implement them. And that’s what some parties are saying they can’t do. And we frankly don’t understand why they wouldn’t because INDCs are nationally derived. They are derived out of national processes, consultations, rules, regulations, what have you. I mean, countries are free to put forward their best effort, and they arrive at their best effort nationally. Nobody imposes anything.

Because of that nature – they’re bottom-up – we don’t understand why any party would have difficulty with implementing it. It’s as if we pass national legislation and then we say ‘no we don’t want to implement that legislation. It’s a rule that nobody needs to follow.’ But, the reason why ... a commitment – a legally binding commitment - to also implement [INDCs] is so critical to us ... is because we understand that we’re not doing climate action at these talks. We’re building a system to do climate action over time.

A key feature of that system – is that it inspires the trust and the confidence of all parties. So it is important that all parties be confident that we are all going to participate. One way to safeguard against that is, of course, you make those commitments legally binding.

Q: What are you seeing in Angola and the rest of the LDCs in terms of the impact of climate change already?

A: One of the inspiring outcomes of the leaders event is that there is now clearly unequivocal recognition that climate change is real. The science has been 99.9 percent undisputed for a long time, but even then there were some policy doubters. So a great outcome of that was that there is unequivocal recognition that it is real, and we have a small window to do something about it and that window is now.

What do we see in places like Angola? We see more severe cycles of droughts and floods. Angola is a country that has a long coastal line so we see risks to fish stocks, to settlements along the coast. Half of Angola’s population lives along the coast, so the economy is very sea-dependent. So we see risks there.

With droughts and floods, there are risks of decreasing crop yields and loss of arable land. In some cases we see that already. Southern Angola right now is experiencing, for the last two years, a severe drought. There is a humanitarian emergency looming. These are the things that we are seeing, and we know from the science that climate change will only exacerbate that.

We have an opportunity to do something about it now. Collectively, we must do it. And we can only do it at this level. The nature of climate change is such that no one party alone can protect itself from its effects. So we must collectively tackle the causes so that we diminish the effect at the local level, and we must also collectively address the effects. And this is the place and the time to do it.

– Interview conducted by David J. Unger

Climate change is such an unfathomably large-scale problem that it is tempting to look for silver-bullet solutions. Solar power will save us, one might say, or maybe it’s wind power. It’s easy to think that if only we had really good batteries, we could rest easy knowing it would enable the spread of zero-carbon energy across the globe.

Ultimately, most energy experts agree that it will take a combination of different low- and zero-carbon energy sources to dramatically slash emissions. What role nuclear power plays in that is a subject of debate. Germany, for example, has decided to go nuclear-free while simultaneously shifting off fossil fuels. China, on the other hand, is building loads of reactors to power its growing population without spewing out even more particulate matter into smoggy Chinese skylines. In the US, nuclear power faces a dimmer outlook, but not for any strict policy reason, per se. US natural gas prices are so slow that new nuclear plants have been crowded out of the market in many parts of the country.

Today’s episode of On Point, a Boston-based news radio show, dives deep into this debate. I chime in at the beginning with a quick update from Paris. Then Josh Freed of Third Way, Allison Macfarlane at George Washington University’s Elliot School of International Affairs, and Mark Jacobson of Stanford University explore the various dimensions of nuclear power in a post-Fukushima age. Listen here or in the embed below:

– David J. Unger

Some here in the nation’s capital may be giving the Paris climate talks the cold shoulder, but, on the other coast, one US state is literally bringing its support to the summit’s doorstep.

The Monitor’s Gloria Goodale writes this week about the parade of Californian officials planning to make their presence known at the climate summit in Paris. California governor Jerry Brown, eight members of California’s state legislature, and former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will all pass through Le Bourget, France this week to hobnob with world leaders as they hammer out the details of an international agreement to reduce carbon emissions.

Experts say California’s climate record is something many nations could draw lessons from. Here’s Ms. Goodale, writing from LA:

California has acted almost like an independent nation on climate change – from then-Governor Schwarzenegger bucking the Bush administration to set aggressive greenhouse gas targets to current Governor Brown crisscrossing North America to find partners for his climate agenda.

For nations laying out a new path forward on climate change in Paris, California has decades of experience to draw on and an eagerness to share.

Many climate advocates point to California as an example of how climate change can be stymied without harming economic growth. California implemented its own carbon cap-and-trade program in 2012 and recently passed a requirement that all state utility companies get at least 50 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2030. Meanwhile, the state’s economy has grown faster than the national average in recent years.

“That is the most alluring element of the California story – the phenomenon of saving money while saving the environment,” Derek Walker, associate vice president on global climate for the Environmental Defense Fund, told the Monitor.  

Read the full piece here: At Paris climate talks, California has a message for the world

-Cristina Maza

In his first press conference at this year’s Paris climate summit, US Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern looked understandably tired. It had no doubt been a busy few days of meeting, greeting, and assuaging the concerns of the many heads of state in town for this year’s highly anticipated climate negotiations.

Still, whatever Mr. Stern lacked in sleep Wednesday, he compensated for with quiet confidence in a process that has been 20 years in the making.

“We are off to a good start,” Stern told the assembled press, his voice hoarse from early-stage negotiations. “We have issues that are still challenging, but we come here with a great deal of positive momentum.”

That momentum is the result of 184 countries, which together produce 98 percent of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions, submitting an official climate pledge ahead of the talks here in Le Bourget, a suburb northwest of Paris. According to estimates by the United Nations, those voluntary contributions get the world about halfway to the stated goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Now, diplomats are meeting behind closed doors to hammer out the details of an agreement that will shape global energy and the climate once current pledges run their course in 2020.

The mere scope of participation in this year’s talks is an impressive accomplishment, officials and observers say, and is a departure from past agreements that focused only on certain blocs of countries. But in Wednesday’s press conference, Stern echoed other officials in saying that the Paris agreement would need to do more – both during this summit and beyond.

“There is broad consensus, a broad convergence, around the notion that there absolutely do need to be successive rounds of contributions,” Stern said. “Otherwise we would be looking at a kind of one-off agreement. I think that’s not what people have in mind. It’s certainly not what we have in mind.”

One key issue emerging in the talks is exactly how to make a Paris agreement continue to be meaningful long after diplomats go home and the sprawling complex in Le Bourget is dismantled. Countries are increasingly thinking of some kind of regular review process, Stern said Wednesday. Nations would agree to come back to the negotiating table every five years to reassess their emissions targets. The hope is that continued declines in renewable energy prices will make boosting climate ambitions more palatable in years to come.

Without a routine review and renewal of climate pledges, “there’s a real risk of foreclosing on the 2 degrees pathway,” said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “We have to keep that door open,” he told a press scrum earlier Wednesday.  

Another topic buzzing through the halls of Le Bourget: whether congressional opposition to the Obama administration’s climate policies will derail an emerging global consensus. On Tuesday, House Republicans passed two resolutions disapproving of the Clean Power Plan, which would regulate carbon dioxide emissions from US power plants. The move echoes similar objections by the Senate, but lacks enough votes to override an almost certain veto from President Obama.  

When asked about Tuesday’s resolutions, Stern replied: “I don’t actually think that has much of an effect here ... I think it produces questions. I’ve had countries ask me about it, but what I’ve said is that the Clean Power Plan rule is going to go forward.”

As the Monitor reported earlier this week, US climate politics remain bitterly divided, despite a recent New York Times/CBS News poll finding that two-thirds of Americans support the US joining a binding international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

– David J. Unger

As President Obama wraps up his trip to Paris with a resounding call for a “legally binding” climate treaty and “ambitious targets” to reduce carbon emissions, Republican leaders want the world to know he won’t get their support.

On Tuesday afternoon, GOP lawmakers voted to block the Environmental Protection Agency’s limits on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, a hallmark of Obama’s climate policy. Many say that the vote’s timing is no coincidence.

Representative Ed Whitfield, (R) of Kentucky, meanwhile, didn’t mince words. He said GOP lawmakers were forcing the vote on the EPA rules to “send a message to the climate conference in Paris that in America, there’s serious disagreement with the policies of this president.”

For now, the Obama administration appears unconcerned. The President is expected to veto the measure, and the vote did not have sufficient support in the House and Senate to override a veto. In the long-term, the President says he expects his successor will understand the urgency of curbing climate change, even if that successor is Republican.

“Even if somebody from a different party succeeded me, one of the things you find is when you’re in this job, you think about it differently than if you’re just running for the job,” Obama told CNN Wednesday.

“So whoever is the next president of the United States, if they come in and they suggest somehow that that global consensus, not just 99.5 percent of scientists and experts, but 99 percent of world leaders think this is really important, I think the President of the United States is going to need to think this is really important,” he added.

-Cristina Maza

The spotlight has moved on from Le Bourget for now. Heads of state have gone home, the furor of opening-day activities has subsided, and negotiators have withdrawn to meetings behind closed doors. 

Now the hard part begins.

As nations start putting their chips on the table here in Le Bourget, there’s a lot of talk about “closing the gap.” It’s a reference to the space between where climate progress stands now, and where politicians say it needs to be under a new global agreement.

Right now, national pledges put the world on a pathway toward 3 degrees Celsius warming above pre-industrial levels. The stated aim is to reach 2 degrees C, while some – particularly those countries most vulnerable to climate change – would like to see something closer to 1.5 degrees C.

Even before the talks began, senior officials were conceding that Paris would not result in an agreement meeting the 2 degrees C target. Observers and participants are reiterating that message here, and few expect Paris to completely close this ambition gap. What they say they do expect is that Paris at least put the world on a path toward a path to 2 degrees C. The alternative is that the Paris agreement essentially gives up on ever reaching 2 degrees C.

Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, told a scrum of reporters Wednesday that “there’s a real risk of foreclosing on the 2 degrees pathway” if there’s no mechanism for renewing climate pledges after Paris. “We have to keep that door open,” he said outside a press conference in Le Bourget’s media center.  

There’s another gap at play here, and it’s related to the temperature gap at the core of negotiations. It’s the gap between what famous politicians declare from the rostrum and what obscure negotiators hardball in windowless rooms. It’s a variation on the universal gap between talking the talk and walking the walk. For more than 20 years, officials have worked to close this gap on climate change. The talk has gotten exponentially stronger in recent years, while the walk has moved only incrementally.

There’s a sense here in Le Bourget that the gap between talking and walking is indeed closing, but slowly.

“Progress is uneven,” Mr. Meyer told reporters.

– David J. Unger    

When it comes to energy technofixes, carbon capture and storage (CCS) is by no means the most popular or seductive climate solution. Injecting emissions underground isn’t as simple or elegant as converting sunlight or wind into power for everyday life. But there’s growing, if quiet, support for trapping carbon and putting it back where we found it – namely, in the ground.

“We need all of the low-carbon technologies,” Tim Dixon, technical program manager at the International Energy Agency’s Greenhouse Gas R&D Programme, said at a panel on CCS here in Le Bourget Tuesday. “They all have an impact.”

Indeed, the IEA estimates that CCS could contribute 13 percent of the emissions reductions necessary to keep warming within 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. That comes in third behind electricity efficiency and renewables and in front of nuclear.

The reason is that much of the world’s energy supply – especially in developing countries like China and India – is tied to cheap, portable, storable coal. The pragmatist’s argument is that it would be much easier to give those countries the tools to clean up their current energy infrastructure, rather than ask them to overhaul it entirely.

Of course, that assumes that CCS technology is ready for primetime. In the US, it has been slow to catch on, but it’s a different story abroad.

“The question with every emerging technology is, ‘will it work?’”, Philip Ringrose of oil supermajor Statoil, said at Tuesday’s panel. His answer? “Yes, it works. It’s been working for 19 years, and it’s growing.”

Mr. Ringrose points to two projects off the coast of Norway as evidence. Statoil’s Snøhvit and Sleipner projects have been operating for 7 years and 19 years respectively and have stored a combined 20 million tonnes of CO2 emissions from offshore gas fields.

Translating that success to coal plants in the US or Canada has proven more difficult. Policy plays a big role here. Most of the CCS success stories presented in Tuesday’s panel were based in countries that have a carbon price or some other kind of incentive for reducing carbon emissions. It’s a reminder that industry requires strong signals from policymakers to turn climate talk into climate action – particularly when it comes to an unglamorous technology like CCS.

A company might install solar panels on its own accord to save on fuel costs or generate good PR. But a power firm has little incentive to capture CO2 from its smokestacks unless it can sell those emissions to someone else or use them to meet a regulatory demand. Policy follows technology, but the inverse is also true.

– David J. Unger   

Yesterday was full of bold declarations, new initiatives, and news from across the globe. It’s worth sharing a few of the stories you may have missed from day one of the Paris talks:

• India unveils global solar alliance of 120 countries at Paris climate summit by The Guardian
  There are alliances and organizations and cartels for oil- and gas-rich countries, so shouldn’t there be something similar for countries rich in solar resources? That’s the question India Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to address in Monday’s unveiling of the International Solar Alliance.
  
  
• Can an International Agreement on Climate Change Save the Planet? by To the Point
  I joined climate scientist Michael Mann, The Guardian’s Suzanne Goldenberg, and others to chat COP21 on PRI’s To the Point. Here’s hoping the jet lag isn’t overtly audible.
  
  
• Why climate change isn’t a winning issue in US politics by The Christian Science Monitor
  Two-thirds of Americans support the United States joining a binding international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to a New York Times poll out Monday. Still, as the Monitor’s Henry Gass notes, “little has changed in the American politics of climate change.”
  
  
• Why Are World Leaders Calling Paris a “First Step” After 21 Years of Climate Negotiations? by Slate
  Many officials and leaders are tryig to frame the Paris talks as a first step or turning point in global climate efforts. It’s largely an attempt to manage expectations and to clean the slate of previous diplomatic acrimony. But not everyone is pleased with approaching the issue that way. After all, these talks have been going on for two decades, with little to show for concrete impacts on global greenhouse-gas emissions.
  
  
• Bill Gates’s new private-public push seeks clean energy innovation by The Christian Science Monitor
  The two-prong launch of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition and Mission Innovation yesterday are a much-needed sign of collaboration between government and business. They also represent a major boost for a crucial component that is often overlooked in formal negotiations: support for basic research into next-generation energy technologies.

– David J. Unger

The big names were in town today to kick off this year’s UN climate summit.

Early high-profile appearances were a very pointed departure from past international summits. Instead of the heads of state parachuting in at the end of negotiations as closers, this year’s summit leveraged world leaders like US President Barack Obama, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin to open talks with a bang. The hope is that this arrangement will give negotiators some momentum as they start talks, while freeing them from senior-level politicking in the eleventh hour of talks. So far, it seems to be having an impact. It was impressive to see so much overlap among climate speeches from diverse parties that clash on so many other topics.

The presence of so many heads of states certainly made for a frenetic scene Monday in the sprawling complex that is the climate conference site in suburban Le Bourget. From my first quick piece for the Monitor out of the talks:

Officials burst down corridors flanked by aides and trailed by lights and cameras. Multiple languages and modes of dress were on display, all participants sharing only a light blue lanyard – not unlike the UN’s iconic helmets of a similar hue. The site itself still feels like a work in progress, and one that won’t last forever. False floors moved in unexpected ways, and interior structures made heavy use of particle board.

There’s plenty more where that came from.

Read the full piece here: World leaders show rare unity in climate summit opening

– David J. Unger

Ahead of next week’s climate talks, the Monitor sent a simple, three-question survey to a range of officials, scientists, business leaders, and other observers in the energy and climate world. The aim of the survey is to better understand what experts believe can or should happen before, during, and after the Paris summit. We’ll be featuring the responses we received throughout the week here in the notebook.

Today’s response to The Summit Survey comes from Jennifer Morgan, global director of the climate program at World Resources Institute. Questions are in bold after the photo, and responses are in italics.

1. How would you define success in this year’s Paris climate talks?
   The Paris ‘Moment’ needs to be a turning point for the world to a more transformational approach to tackling climate change. The Agreement, universal in scope, should catalyze enough action, by countries, cities, companies and investors so as to avoid the worst impacts of climate change while providing support to the most vulnerable countries to manage the impacts.


2. What must be done during the talks to achieve that success?
   All countries have to come to Paris ready to find solutions and work in coalition with others, whether from developed or developing countries. Developed countries, in particular, need to demonstrate to the poorest countries that they will support them in dealing with the impacts of climate change. This will create the trust needed to forge a new form of international cooperation on climate change.
   


3. What happens after Paris?
   Paris is just a moment. The road to transformation has to go through Paris and into the board rooms of banks that should shift investments; into national parliaments to pass laws to meet and beat the targets set and into the public discourse so that everyone can participate in this transformation.

Check the notebook throughout the week for more responses to The Summit Survey.

I have a long flight ahead of me to Paris via Dublin, so I am hoping to get some reading done along the way. My pre-Paris reading list is mostly last-minute refreshing on key components of the negotiations, emerging energy technologies, and core climate science. Here's what's on it so far, and drop me an e-mail if you have other suggestions:

• Synthesis report on the aggregate effect of the intended nationally determined contributions by UNFCCC
  Late last month, the UNFCCC tallied up what individual climate pledges are likely to accomplish in the aggregate. I've only skimmed the report, so I'm hoping to spend a bit more time with it before negotiations kick off.


• Cool it by National Geographic
  National Geographic put together a special issue on climate change that takes a step back and looks at the basics of the challenge, how to fix it, and how to adapt to it. The piece on Germany's Energiewende was very good, and I'm curious to read the rest of the issue.


• Examining the International Climate Negotiations by David Waskow
  Mr. Waskow of World Resources Institute testified before the Senate's Committee on Environment and Public Works earlier this month. There's a lot of skepticism and criticism in Congress toward the international climate process, so I'm always curious to hear how people who care a lot about the subject explain it to a wary audience. For the critical viewpoint, read the testimony from the Manhattan Institute's Oren Cass on the same panel.


• An Economic View of the Environment by Robert Stavins
  I'm not sure anyone knows more about the history and dynamics of global climate talks than Robert Stavins, an environmental economist at Harvard University. His blog is a must-read.


• Key Legal Issues in the 2015 Climate Negotiations by Center for Climate and Energy Solutions
  Will the agreement be legally binding or not? That is one of the most important and most misunderstood questions surrounding the talks. This briefing is from this summer so it may be a bit outdated, but I'm hoping it will provide some general framework for better understanding this thorny issue.


• Oblivion by David Foster Wallace
  The human mind can take only so much reading about carbon budgets, Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, and "common but differentiated" responsibilities. There's nothing better to take your mind off dense, intricate, nonfiction writing than ... dense, intricate fiction writing.

What did I miss? E-mail me at: ungerd@csmonitor.com

– David J. Unger

Ahead of next week’s climate talks, the Monitor sent a simple, three-question survey to a range of officials, scientists, business leaders, and other observers in the energy and climate world. The aim of the survey is to better understand what experts believe can or should happen before, during, and after the Paris summit. We’ll be featuring the responses we received throughout the week here in the notebook.

Today’s response to The Summit Survey comes from Lyndon Rive, co-founder and CEO of SolarCity. Questions are in bold after the photo, and responses are in italics.

1. How would you define success in this year’s Paris climate talks?
   I think it’s a success if it helps the world understand that the scale of the solutions need to match the scale of the problem. A successful agreement will put the world on a low-carbon path, and push countries to move more aggressively toward clean energy. The outcome should send a clear message to businesses and regulators worldwide that renewable energy must be embraced in all forms – whether from rooftops, commercial sites, or utility-scale power plants. The talks should also pave the way to create affordable clean energy options for the the 1.3 billion people around the world who currently lack electricity.
   


2. What must be done during the talks to achieve that success?
   For the talks to be successful, negotiators will have to focus on the economic opportunity that is inherent in solving climate change but also understand the economic impact of not burning coal and natural gas. It is often viewed that coal is the cheapest form of energy. To achieve success the world needs to know the cost of coal is far greater than renewable energy. It’s not hard to grasp that the fuel cost for renewable power is zero and there is almost zero external cost. By focusing on transforming the energy infrastructure the wider business community is ready to seize on these opportunities. Climate change solutions create jobs. In the US, the solar industry already employs about 175,000 people -- that’s more than the coal industry. In California, the solar industry employs more people than the five big utilities, combined.
   


3. What happens after Paris?
   Paris isn’t the only venue for near-term policymaking about climate change solutions. After the summit, we have to secure good policy outcomes at the state level and local level in the US. In the coming year, regulators in California and Nevada will make decisions about whether utilities should be required to pay a fair and full price for solar power that customers send to the grid. The utilities are hoping for an anti-solar decision that protects their monopoly and profits, but of course the stakes are too high for that. To solve climate change, we need more clean power, not less. So after the dust settles after the Paris talks, we need states like California to continue to walk the walk on climate leadership and create opportunities for individuals and organizations of all shapes and sizes to participate in the solution by adopting clean energy.

Check the notebook throughout the week for more responses to The Summit Survey.

Ahead of next week’s climate talks, the Monitor sent a simple, three-question survey to a range of officials, scientists, business leaders, and other observers in the energy and climate world. The aim of the survey is to better understand what experts believe can or should happen before, during, and after the Paris summit. We’ll be featuring the responses we received throughout the week here in the notebook.

Today’s response to The Summit Survey comes from Brice Lalonde, special advisor on sustainable development to the United Nations and former French minister of the environment. Questions are in bold after the photo, and responses are in italics.

1. How would you define success in this year’s Paris climate talks?
   There are two criteria for measuring success in Paris.
   
   The first would be that everyone is on board. It means the COP21 will agree on a successor to the Kyoto protocol and that all the countries have something to do if they emit greenhouse gases and/or to receive if they need help to adapt.
   
   The second is whether the agreement brings us to a world where the rise of temperature doesn’t exceed 2°C at the end of the century, or at least that it will bring us there because it will upgrade it outcomes every five years.
   


2. What must be done during the talks to achieve that success?
   The negotiations separate the political agreement from the countries commitments. The latter are not binding (or perhaps in national legislation). But in the agreement, transparency (measure, report, verify), regular review and upgrading every five years should become binding.
   
   A second track should be opened from now on to include input from local governments and business. The so-called Lima Paris action agenda must live and be incorporated in goal reaching coalitions.
   


3. What happens after Paris?
   After COP21 we’ll have COP22 in Marrakech. It will be about implementing the Paris accord, or achieving it. It should be also a moment to hear the voice of Africa and to concentrate on adaptation. What is the first impact of climate change? It is water change. Water is becoming a central issue. But no global institution is in charge of water. It’s perhaps time to create an equivalent of IPCC for water.
   
   And it will be about time for the world economy to take up the baton from the climate negotiators.

Check the notebook throughout the week for more responses to The Summit Survey.

Ahead of next week’s climate talks, the Monitor sent a simple, three-question survey to a range of officials, scientists, business leaders, and other observers in the energy and climate world. The aim of the survey is to better understand what experts believe can or should happen before, during, and after the Paris summit. We’ll be featuring the responses we received throughout the week here in the notebook.

Today’s response to The Summit Survey comes from John Kerry, US Secretary of State. Questions are in bold after the photo, and responses are in italics.

1. How would you define success in this year’s Paris climate talks?
   It’s pretty simple: Success in Paris means an inclusive, durable agreement that will enable the world to transition to a global low-carbon, climate resilient economy.
   
   Decades of science tell us that, unless we make that transition, we are facing serious impacts with respect to infrastructure, food production, the economy, public health, global security, water supplies, ecosystems, and potentially to human life itself. It’s an enormous challenge. But those impacts are not yet inevitable. We still have time to change course.
   
   So, success in Paris would be walking away with a global agreement that would establish, for the first time, a long-term climate change regime that applies to all countries and focuses both on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and building resilience. It would be securing an agreement that is fair – that includes strong transparency and accountability measures, and ensures ongoing financial and technical assistance to those in need. And importantly, it would be reaching an agreement that won’t become irrelevant in a year or two – but instead can evolve and endure and become even more effective with time.
   
   I have been involved with this issue for decades – since my early days in the U.S. Senate. I have watched the world try – and fail – to address climate change more than once. But we are now closer than ever to succeeding. Which is good news – because the science tells us that our window of opportunity is closing, and the climate talks in Paris could well be the last chance the world gets to take broad global steps that can actually move the needle. So we have to get it right.


2. What must be done during the talks to achieve that success?
   It all comes down to cooperation. This challenge is as global as it gets, and addressing it is going to require a similarly global solution. Obviously, each nation has its own concerns and domestic imperatives, but we can’t let that obstruct us from coming together to honor our shared responsibility to act. We won’t get very far if delegations come to Paris and simply reiterate the positions they’ve had for decades. The United States is heading into these negotiations ready to roll up our sleeves, find common ground, and, ultimately, to reach an agreement that works – not just for our nation, but for the entire world. And I think our partners around the globe are ready to do the same.
   


3. What happens after Paris?
   In many ways, that’s when the real works begins. An agreement in Paris won’t solve this challenge in and of itself – but it will lay the groundwork for a global solution. It will bring everyone to the table and demonstrate a shared sense of urgency. It will prove that world leaders finally understand the scope of the challenge we’re up against. It will give confidence to business leaders and innovators and entrepreneurs, who may be uncertain about our collective commitment and hesitant to invest in the low-carbon alternatives we need. And it will help leaders at every level of government in every corner of the globe to know they are part of a worldwide effort to build sustainable economies.
   
   So Paris is about formalizing our global commitment to a safer, more sustainable future. After Paris, it will be about honoring those commitments and actually implementing the changes we’ve all been working toward.

Check the notebook throughout the week for more responses to The Summit Survey.

Hot off the presses: two new Monitor pieces that aim to set the scene for next week’s summit.

The first is from Cristina Maza, who takes a look at one major issue that still divides diplomats at the negotiating table: finance. Here’s Ms. Maza, writing from Washington:

[D]espite the optimistic outlook most actors are bringing to the table, one big sticking point remains. Many developing nations are requesting additional funds to help them deal with the worst effects of climate change and transition to a low-carbon economy. Some have even suggested that they would not sign an international climate agreement if monetary support is not available.

Read the full piece here: Could finance derail Paris climate talks?

The second piece is from me, and is a broader “curtain raiser.” I tried to touch on the full range of issues at play in next week’s talks, with an emphasis on what has changed since the last time nations tried to forge a major deal. A lot, it turns out. Here’s a quick table comparing some key indicators and how they’ve changed since the Copenhagen talks in 2009:

To me, that is why many long-time observers of climate talks are more optimistic than before about a major deal in Paris. The global economy is stronger. US unemployment is down. Average global temperatures are higher. Renewable energy is dramatically cheaper. And some (but not all) polls suggest more Americans think global warming is mostly human caused.

Read the full piece here: In Paris, a turning point for global climate talks

– David J. Unger

Ahead of next week’s climate talks, the Monitor sent a simple, three-question survey to a range of officials, scientists, business leaders, and other observers in the energy and climate world. The aim of the survey is to better understand what experts believe can or should happen before, during, and after the Paris summit. We’ll be featuring the responses we received throughout the week here in the notebook.

Today’s response to The Summit Survey comes from Rachel Kyte, World Bank Group vice president and special envoy for climate change. Questions are in bold after the photo, and responses are in italics. Note: responses are transcribed from a recorded interview.  

1. How would you define success in this year’s Paris climate talks?
   At this stage – with all the [Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs)] filed, with partnerships in abundance, with serious commitments behind them, with a politically credible pathway to a $100 billion – what we really need now is the strongest possible political signal from a strong negotiated text that the international community is committed to moving the global economy in the direction of low carbon and resiliency. This means that we wish to see the strongest level of ambition in the text, but also we hope to see commitments from governments outside of the text to take care of the pressing adaptation needs of the poorest and most vulnerable between now and 2020.
   
   
2. What must be done during the talks to achieve that success?
   Having the heads of state come early and narrow down the space for prevarication, delay – and to support negotiators to build ambition into the text – is an important innovation and hopefully one that is successful. Negotiators need to be able to take comfort from the extraordinary activities and action from mayors, from CEOs and businesses in all countries in all sectors of the economy, from civil society, from the finance sector, from the multinational development banks. Everybody is urging them to a level of political ambition that we haven’t seen before, and they should not doubt that but take comfort in it and come up with clear unequivocal language about the speed with which we wish to travel in the direction of low-carbon growth.
   
   
3. What happens after Paris?
   On the Monday morning after Paris, organizations like the World Bank Group will be with our sleeves rolled up with our clients – governments, cities, regions, the private sector in all of the countries in which we work – ready to help them think through how to implement their INDCs as part of our strategic engagement with them. [We will also be] helping them think through how to use all the levers of economic and fiscal policy available to them to drive carbon out of their growth and how to help them find the investments to make their people more resilient.

Check the notebook throughout the week for more responses to The Summit Survey.

As negotiators head to Paris for COP21, the fate of climate finance will be on the minds of many.

Following the negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009, leaders of the developed world pledged to provide $100 billion by the year 2020 to help developing nations adapt to the worst effects of climate change. Now, just five years away, some say it’s unclear how much of that money has been delivered to the so-called Green Climate Fund. Many in Paris are expected to push for a more rigorous process to count and define climate finance in the years after 2020.

“It is not possible to give a definite number [of delivered climate finance] because negotiating parties have yet to agree on what counts towards the $100 billion,” says Barbara Buchner, senior director of the Climate Policy Initiative.

But climate-finance vehicles, including the Green Climate Fund, play an important role, Dr. Buchner emphasizes.  Here’s a great diagram from the Climate Policy Initiative that maps investment vehicles and their importance to overall climate finance.

“We find that development finance institutions have provided one third of total global finance – USD 131 billion, and the major share of public climate finance,” Buchner says.

- Cristina Maza

Ahead of next week’s climate talks, the Monitor sent a simple, three-question survey to a range of officials, scientists, business leaders, and other observers in the energy and climate world. The aim of the survey is to better understand what experts believe can or should happen before, during, and after the Paris summit. We’ll be featuring the responses we received throughout the week in the notebook.

Today’s response to The Summit Survey comes from Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University in State College, Pa. Questions are in bold after the photo, and responses are in italics.  

1. How would you define success in this year’s Paris climate talks?
   I would define success as an actionable agreement for all countries to sign on to carbon emissions reductions that go well beyond their current commitments. The commitments already on the table going into Paris, get us half way from business-as-usual warming by the end of the century (~5C/9F warming of globe) to 2C/3.6F stabilization (what many scientists consider to constitute dangerous climate change). I would like to see us at least get at least another half-way toward that goal in Paris.
   
   
2. What must be done during the talks to achieve that success?
   We need the world’s major emitters (U.S., China, India) to demonstrate the leadership necessary to get developing countries on board. The U.S. has a legacy of two centuries of access to cheap but dirty fossil fuel energy. If we are to see commitments from the developing world to move in the direction of renewables rather than fossil fuels as they seek to grow their economies, we need to demonstrate some moral leadership on this issue.
   
   
3. What happens after Paris?
   Paris is just a first step. We can’t expect in this single conference to get an agreement that alone will be adequate to prevent dangerous warming of the planet. Instead, we need to see sufficient enough progress that we can envision meeting that goal over the next one or two subsequent conferences.

Check the notebook throughout the week for more responses to The Summit Survey.

Some view the wide range of pre-Paris national climate pledges as a sign that the world is close to a meaningful, historic deal. Shyam Saran, India’s former chief climate negotiator, does not see it that way.  

In a piece out today in The Guardian, Mr. Saran argues that developed nations must “make significant and absolute reductions in their emissions” to leave room in the global carbon budget for developing nations. It’s an argument that has long been made along lines of climate equity – namely, that it’s unfair for developed nations to ask developing nations to curtail emissions when developed nations are largely responsible for the emissions stock.

There is a difference between the emissions of developing countries which are “survival” emissions and those of developed countries which are in the nature of “lifestyle” emissions. They do not belong to the same category and cannot be treated on a par.

In other words, burning one ton of coal in India is not the same as burning one ton of coal in the US, even if the net impact on global emissions is the same.

Saran does offer some hope for bridging the divide. So much of the Paris climate agreement is reductive and reactive – pledges to reduce emissions, to keep warming in check, and to fund projects protecting against climate disasters. But what if there was a greater emphasis on productive targets – namely, a shared, international goal to innovate solar technologies down to a certain price point, or to create a battery with double the capacity of today’s batteries. Such a target might give nations of all different stripes an accessible point around which to rally. Here’s Saran’s take:

Why not create a global technology platform which brings together the best minds from developed and developing countries alike to create new climate-friendly technologies which can then be disseminated as global public goods? Given the promise of solar power, why not announce a global solar mission designed to make it a mainstream energy source in a decade? Since coal will continue to be a major source of power generation in many countries of the world, could we collaborate together on a clean coal mission which reduces harmful emissions and increases the efficiency of coal combustion?  

It may be too late to embed this line of thinking into the agreement itself, but it seems like an idea worth holding on to for future negotiations.

– David J. Unger

For every sign that energy is getting cleaner, there’s a reminder that overhauling complex systems is an arduous, uneven challenge.

Germany’s latest energy-transition status report (German) documents a remarkable shift toward cleaner fuels and reduced emissions. Renewables are now the country’s most important source of power, fossil fuel imports have plummeted, and residential power prices are on the decline for the first time in a decade.

Still, it’s not enough – at least not according to Germany’s very, very ambitious targets. A group of experts analyzing the report wrote in their own report that Germany would have to triple its decarbonization rate yearly until 2020 in order to meet its near-term goal.

Here’s a useful chart from the report, translated from German by Clean Energy Wire:

In almost every case, the bars representing actual change (red and light gray) fall short of the bars representing what’s needed to reach national targets.

It’s important to remember that Germany’s targets are among the most ambitious in the world – particularly for an exports-based economy that is the fourth largest in the world. What’s more, it’s attempting to shift away from fossil fuels while also shifting away from nuclear power – a major source of carbon-free, baseload electricity. In other words, even if Germany misses its targets, it’s still innovating its way toward a dramatically cleaner, more efficient grid.

– David J. Unger

The Monitor’s Beijing bureau chief Peter Ford asks an important question in a dispatch from China’s capital yesterday: Will China be seen as a leader or a villain at the Paris climate summit?

It depends on how you look at it. As Mr. Ford writes:   

The case against [Chinese] President Xi [Jinping] is simple: China is easily the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world and has always refused to set itself any firm targets for a cap on emissions, let alone a reduction.

On the other hand, China is by far the biggest investor in renewable energy sources and is moving faster than any other nation to transform its economy to take advantage of this. “China has taken an undisputed leadership” in the development of renewable energy, UN climate chief Christiana Figueres told reporters at a recent event hosted by The Christian Science Monitor in Washington D.C.

Perhaps the broader concern is whether or not China can live up to the ambitious goals it has set for decarbonizing its sprawling energy supply. The mere scale of it is staggering: “[T]o generate a fifth of its energy needs from wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear sources by 2030,” Ford writes, citing a Greenpeace analysis. “China will have to install the equivalent of all the electricity that the United States generates today, just in renewable sources.”

That’s a lot of wind turbines and solar panels.

Still, the pressure on President Xi to clean up China’s act is enormous. Some of that pressure comes from the international community, but Ford writes that the biggest motivating factor is the everyday misery of living in a polluted landscape. Here’s Ford again:

As Chinese citizens choking on industrial smog know, their government’s traditional model of economic growth – one that has helped poison the country’s air, soil, and water – is no longer sustainable.

-Cristina Maza

Does climate change cause terrorism? Does it cause bad weather? What about forest fires? Can we blame it for last winter in Boston?

Well, it’s complicated.

The causal relationship between humans burning carbon-based fuels and any number of global ills is often oversimplified for political purposes. One side might bring a snow ball onto the Senate floor to argue that cold weather proves global temperatures are not rising. The other side might suggest more renewables could have prevented the war in Syria. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.

David Roberts over at Vox has an excellent piece on what he calls the “long and tangled” carbon causal chain. Like the New Yorker piece we wrote about yesterday, Mr. Roberts also draws a line between climate change and instability in Syria. But he paints a far more nuanced picture, diving even deeper into what we’re really trying to say when we say climate change “causes” something. Here’s the crux of his argument:

[T]he causal chain from carbon combustion to national security threats ... is extremely long and tenuous. In some ways, the climate science is the easiest part to figure out. We can get a decent sense of whether a drought is unusually hot or long relative to historical records. But trying to untangle the causes of a particular episode of human violence is devilishly difficult. Would events in Syria have unfolded differently if the recent droughts there had been, say, 15 percent less severe? We have no idea ...

... Nonetheless! We can say that rising atmospheric GHGs have made situations such as Syria more likely at the margins, and that they will send an increasingly clear signal in the future. We can say that, in aggregate, there will be more such situations in coming decades.

It's not a simple or clean explanation of cause, effect, and climate change. But it's closer to the truth than what we otherwise get from headlines, slogans, and soundbites.

- David J. Unger

On a busy planet, energy and climate are always competing for attention with other, seemingly more pressing issues. After last week’s Paris attacks, it looked like a present-day crisis might again eclipse the long-term challenges of shifting toward cleaner fuels and preparing for life in a warmer world.

Climatologist Jason Box and author Naomi Klein argue that shouldn’t be the case. They write in the New Yorker that the act of violent extremism makes this year’s climate talks all the more relevant and vital:  

What if, instead of changing the subject, we deepened the discussion of climate change and expanded the range of solutions, which are fundamental for real human security? What if, instead of being pushed aside in the name of war, climate action took center stage as the planet’s best hope for peace?

The links between a changing climate and global insecurity have been drawn by no less an authority on the subject than the US Department of Defense. A DoD report this summer warned that rising temperatures would “aggravate problems such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership and weak political institutions that threaten stability in a number of countries.”

The Paris climate talks alone won’t solve climate change – and, of course, they certainly won’t end terrorism. But they do offer a rare chance for representatives from virtually every country to collaborate on a substantial threat to peace and stability. Climate change is often portrayed as the ultimate tragedy of the commons. But it’s an opportunity for the commons, too.

– David J. Unger

There is no shortage of organizations calling for an end to energy subsidies, which economists largely agree are economically inefficient, environmentally damaging, and disproportionately benefit the wealthy. The hard part is figuring out how to do it.

The New Climate Economy has a white paper out today that offers some useful case studies of how countries are able to scale back or remove entirely subsidies for carbon-heavy fuels. It’s by no means easy, and can create some short-term political challenges, but the body of evidence suggests phasing out these subsidies provides a net boost to national economies.

India, for example, shows some signs of success. From the paper:

Recognising the negative impacts of the subsidies for the consumption of fossil fuels, in 2010 the Indian government sought to liberalise the price of petrol,428 and in 2013 it began a phased deregulation of diesel prices. This has already resulted in a significant decrease in India’s budget deficit, as well as in the share of diesel vehicles in India’s passenger car fleet.429 The petroleum subsidy was halved to US$5 billion in 2014/15.430 By October 2014, the government had fully deregulated the price of diesel and, due to low international oil prices, retail prices have remained relatively stable.

Notwithstanding this recent success, subsidies for LPG, kerosene, electricity and gas remain high. In response, in January 2015 India’s Finance Minister announced a new phase of subsidy reform for LPG and kerosene, combined with an increase in excise duties on petroleum and diesel.431 Taken together, the reforms are expected to help to bring the fiscal deficit down from 5.5% of GDP in 2014/15 to 4.2% in 2015/16.432 In the recently published OECD inventory it is estimated that fossil fuel subsidies in India had a combined value of US$9.6 billion in 2014.433

– David J. Unger

The International Energy Agency may be about to gain a 30th member.

Mexico submitted an official letter Wednesday announcing its desire to become a member of the IEA. The announcement comes as the country implements widespread reforms to its energy sector that are expected to boost oil production and increase foreign investment.

“The IEA offers a forum to develop joint answers and global co-operation schemes to guarantee energy security, promote economic development and foster environmental sustainability worldwide,” Mexico’s energy secretary Pedro Joaquín Coldwell confirmed in a statement.

For its part, the IEA appears poised to welcome Mexico with open arms.

“I am delighted that Mexico, a G20 member and significant energy producer and consumer, has decided to take this important step,” IEA Executive Director Faith Birol said during a press conference.

Mexico is the fourth largest energy producer in America, following the United States, Canada, and Brazil. In March it made headlines by becoming the first developing nation to submit its INDCs ahead of the Paris climate talks.

- Cristina Maza

This year’s climate talks are getting a lot of attention from a constituency that hasn’t always been so keen on curbing emissions: the private sector.

Over 1,000 companies are heading to Paris in December to attend the international climate negotiations. Long-term investors and businesses leaders largely agree that a low-carbon economy is the future, and they’re heading to Paris to push for policies that facilitate innovation and investment in clean energy. Business leaders and investors say that policy certainty is of paramount importance. It’s why they tend push for broad, long-term policy mechanisms like a global price on carbon. What’s more, in the lead up to Paris, some major companies pledged to start using renewable power for 100 percent of their energy needs.  

Many say they expect Paris to be a watershed moment that will lead to a clean energy revolution.

“The money is on the move,” Anne Simpson, investment director at CalPERS, a retirement investment agency in California, said in a conference call Tuesday hosted by We Mean Business. “When the CEO of Shell says solar is the energy of the future, that is the direction of change.” Solutions to climate change open up a world of business opportunities and will be the biggest driver of investment of our lifetime, experts say.

- Cristina Maza

World leaders are cheering France’s decision to hold the UN climate talks as scheduled, despite the horrific attack on Paris Friday by members of the Islamic State. Numerous French officials and foreign diplomats insist that the talks must go on despite the tragedy. Addressing climate change is too important to postpone, they say.

“We cannot acquiesce to brutality. It is important that terror attacks don’t dissuade us from what’s most important to the international community,” Jeffrey Waheed, deputy permanent representative of the Maldives to the United Nations, told Climate Wire.

While the talks themselves will continue as planned, organizers are saying concerts, festivities, and other side events may be pared back or cancelled entirely.

-Cristina Maza

UN climate summit organizers are assessing security concerns in light of last night’s Paris attacks. France will host the talks as planned but with enhanced security measures, according to Politico Europe and Reuters, both citing unnamed diplomatic sources. UN climate chief Christiana Figueres took to Twitter to express her solidarity:

– David J. Unger

In global climate diplomacy – as in all diplomacy – language is everything. Much ado is being made about the back-and-forth between US Secretary of State John Kerry and European officials over whether or not the Paris agreement would be a “treaty.” Ultimately, both sides know the truth is somewhere in the middle, they just have different ways of coming at it. Mr. Kerry, conscious of US politics, is eager to assuage concerns that Congress will block a legally-binding “treaty,” per the US definition of the word. The Europeans, meanwhile, are eager to assuage concerns that a non-binding agreement would be toothless. In the end, some elements of the agreement are likely to be binding, while others likely will not. The hope is that this more nuanced, flexible, “hybrid” approach will make for a more sustainable and inclusive deal.

Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press, has a very good dissection of the semantic acrobatics at play:

[H]ere’s the twist: Both Kerry and Hollande can be right, said Nigel Purvis, an international lawyer who was a top environmental diplomat and international negotiator for Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. It’s an issue of definitions and the way an agreement is framed, said Purvis, who is president of the non-governmental organization Climate Advisers.

– David J. Unger

New data out from Britain’s Met Office shows that the rise of global temperatures will exceed 1 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels in 2015. That brings us halfway to the goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees C, a generally agreed upon safe range. Real Climate’s Gavin Schmidt puts it in perspective:

We have this year’s unusually strong El Niño to thank for the jump in temperatures, but, as Slate’s Eric Holthaus points out, that “wouldn’t exist without decades of heat-trapping emissions from fossil fuel burning.”

It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean every year from here on out will be more than a degree above pre-industrial levels. There are always be fluctuations and abnormalities, so don’t be surprised if next year isn’t quite as hot. Either way, the longer-term trend is clear:

“As the world continues to warm in the coming decades,” the Met Office’s Peter Stott said in a press release, “we will see more and more years passing the 1 degree marker - eventually it will become the norm.”

Keeping within the 2 degrees goal is still technically possible, the Met Office reminds us, but current Paris climate pledges only get us to about 2.7 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Countries would have to commit to more in Paris to meet the target.

– David J. Unger

There comes a time in every global energy transition when it becomes clear that the new source is here to stay. Perhaps 2015 is that moment for the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

To be sure, wind and solar still make up a fraction of global energy, but the latest World Energy Outlook from the International Energy Agency (an organization that has a history of underestimating the spread of renewables) shows that last year renewables made up almost half of all new power supply. Even more impressive, renewables are expected to be the No. 1 source of new energy supply every year through 2040. By the early 2030s, IEA projects renewables will overtake coal as the world’s top electricity source. IEA identifies the triple-threat driving the shift as such:

1. Renewables are getting cheaper
   
2. Oil and gas are getting more expensive to extract
3. Governments are adopting policies that prefer low-carbon fuels

It’s a pretty strong recipe for an energy transformation. So even as total global energy demand rises in coming decades (IEA projects it will grow one-third by 2040), there’s hope that these trend lines mean more of that energy will come from wind and the sun, rather than long-dead dinosaurs we unearth and burn.

–David J. Unger

The New York Times has a big piece out today with a somewhat unsettling headline:

According to new official data, China has been consuming up to 17 percent more carbon-heavily coal than previously estimated. Sounds like a major blow in advance of COP21, but here’s the rub: We sort of already knew about this. Here’s the EIA back in September:

Mother Jones did some digging and found out that the UN also knew about this – indeed the upward revision is already baked into the latest assessment of global climate pledges. In other words, this might be a case of news being news simply because it’s published in the Gray Lady.

Even so, the underlying issue remains: China has a very hard time keeping track of just how much energy it consumes – a lack of clarity that has long unsettled climate watchers.

– David J. Unger

If you haven’t already, do yourself a favor and check out NASA’s DSCOVR website for stunning views like this one:

What you’re seeing is Earth rotating through an entire day as captured in 22 still images taken on Sept. 17, 2015 by NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) camera on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) spacecraft.

In other words, it’s the famous Blue Marble photo but in realtime, and updated daily.

– David J. Unger