48 Hours to Go

His Excellency Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah closes the pages of the booklet he has been painstakingly reading from and closes the stocktaking plenary with a beneficient wave of his hands.

“Goodnight” he declares and turns his mic off.

Then he pauses, and turns his mic back on.

I am fairly certain I hear his handlers inhale sharply, oh god, he is going off-script.

“By goodnight I don't mean to go to sleep.  No.  Goodnight it means, go and work hard and bring results to me.  This is what I meant by good night, work hard!”.

So ends the stocktaking meeting on Wednesday night.  We have three negotiating tracks, 195 countries, and few agreed-upon texts for Ministers to work with.

We've got 48 hours to go. 

----------------------

At 7 pm Madeleine Diouf, the chair of the AWG-KP, anounces that the AWG-KP will start final consultations at 9 pm, to be followed by a plenary that will run indefinitely.  She assures us it will be “a long night ahead” but is confident that texts will arrive by morning.

46 Hours to Go

-----------

At 8 pm the AWG-ADP is indefinitely postponed.

The Co-chair explains: “ADP is the youngest sibling” of the three negotiating tracks, and due to the lack of agreement on the other two, delegations do not have the capacity to address all three simultaneously.  For now, the other tracks are given priority, but this is also dangerous.  He concludes, “we need to finalize our workplan for next year and beyond, and more importantly, we must demonstrat to the world that the ADP is moving forward”. 

45 Hours to Go

---------

At 9 pm the AWG-KP plenary is rescheduled for 11 pm.

Countries cannot agree on who should have the right to trade in the market included in the Kyoto Protocol.  Nor can they agree what to do with the ‘hot air’ credits retained by Russia.

44 Hours to Go

----------

At 4 am the AWG-LCA decides to stop for the day after having made little progress. 

Countries cannot decide what to do about finance.  They cannot decide how the new technology mechanism should be set up.  They cannot agree on the extent to which Intellectual Property Rights should be included in the negotiations.  They have irreconcilable differences about the appropriate strategy for concluding the LCA and starting the ADP.

39 Hours to Go

----------

The AWG-KP plenary is postponed until 11 am.

32 Hours to Go

------------

The closing plenary of the AWG-ADP is scheduled for 3 pm.

There is still no agreed upon text to bring to the final COP decision.  There is no agreed upon workplan for creating a new climate agreement. 

There will be 27 Hours to Go.

-------------

I am sitting in the high-level plenary.  It is almost entirely empty.  Minister after minister stresses that :

“we must take greater action together”

“if we continue like this we risk to disappoint the hopes of millions of people around the globe”

“we cannot stress the urgency of this crisis enough”

 “without increasing ambition we are not going to be able to avoid the 2 degree limit that is required to avoid catastrophe”.

And yet this process is not speeding up.  It is slowing down.  As the Canadian negotiator – clearly content that the KP negotiatons are not his problem and do not involve him signficantly -  remarks smugly, “they said they were going to get the text done by yesterday.  Now they have no text and no time for the lawyers to work on it so its not clear what is going to happen with that”.

The Canadians may be smug that the KP is proving hard to negotiate – afterall, they withdrew last year and have been busy dismantling their own environmental protection systems – but no-one should be smug that none of the other agreements are coming together. 

And so it goes.   Hit that snooze button. 

31 hours to go.

(P.S. I suggest listening to Johnny Cash's 25 Minutes to Go as a soundtrack for this post!)