The Paris Climate Agreement at 10 Years

This COP delegation position paper, turned over to the National Security Archive via a State Department FOIA request, outlines U.S. views of the proposed Paris climate agreement, including the preamble, definitions, mitigation section, adaptation actions, finance, institutional provisions, and final clauses. Key U.S. positions going into Paris included its nonnegotiable stance on differentiation. According to the position paper, the U.S. endorsed the premise that “national efforts will be differentiated across a broad continuum of all Parties based on a range of factors,” but made it clear these must be rooted in evolving circumstances, not the original 1992 designations. This was largely due to China’s growth as a booming industrial power over the previous two decades; the U.S. felt China’s 1992 status as a developing country was “not rational or workable in the post-2020 era.” The bottom line: the United States “would not support a bifurcated approach to a new agreement.”

Ahead of the June Bonn Climate Change negotiating conference, the U.S. delegation identified likely questions for discussion about climate change mitigation, adaptation, and climate finance. On mitigation, the U.S. delegation focused on how countries should self-determine their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and again emphasized the question of how countries should differentiate these contributions: “based on categories, e.g., Annex I, non-Annex I, developed countries, developing countries, emerging economies, middle-income countries, most vulnerable countries, LDCs, SIDS, categories based on agreed criteria, other?” Delegation officials also considered the aspect of “market mechanisms” to be used either under the agreement or outside the agreement. On finance, the paper asked, “who are the expected contributors and recipients, taking into account…the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable?”

This abbreviated Q+A paper discusses “the relationship between emissions, temperature change, and when that temperature change would be realized?” The paper posits that there is “significant uncertainty” in the area of climate sensitivity, with estimates of any given temperature timing “ranging from decades to millennia.” The paper admits that it is “impossible to pinpoint a specific year – or possibly even a specific decade” when a specific temperature threshold “will be breached.” The paper goes on to “put some rough numbers” to projected globally averaged surface temperatures based on atmospheric CO2 concentrations, including projections as far out as the year 2300 (although the paper notes that “very few models have been run out this far”).

In Todd Stern’s book, Landing the Paris Agreement, he discusses the “unnecessarily bumpy” but successful COP20 in Lima, including ongoing issue of differentiation, and the INDC/NDC review process, potential target backsliding, and the resiliency of the U.S.-China Joint Announcement announced a few weeks prior. One topic Stern does not mention, highlighted in Document 4, is the issue of trade policy. This position paper declares a “redline” over international trade rights and obligations within the UNFCCC, asserting that the United States “will not agree to a package that limits the trade-related actions that the United States can take to combat climate change.” Officials believed that countries like “India, Argentina, and other Parties” would “attempt to leverage any negotiations or work on trade or unilateral measures…for new rules in the 2015 agreement,” making the “rules more favorable to developing countries.”

In an email that originated inside the State-Department (that redacts all sender and recipient information under FOIA exemption B6 but includes the State Department’s Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs (OES) in the email signature), U.S. officials provide an outline of the “1997 Kyoto negotiating history,” including distinction for why the U.S. is “pitching an agreement rather than a protocol” for the upcoming COP in Paris. The U.S. official that provides the breakdown of Kyoto negotiations calls countries’ approach to the Kyoto Protocol—specifically the “6-month rule” which requires nations to submit proposed text changes six months in advance— “sloppy or consistent.” Overall, the Kyoto context could be helpful, according to the email, to provide “further thinking on what lessons can be learned from the process, and what will or must be different this time around.” In the reply email, another official says that the U.S. delegation is “worried about Saudis/others blocking consensus” during the Paris Agreement.

This Umbrella Group Strategy paper outlines an agenda and talking points the day before the start of the Geneva Climate Change Conference (held from February 8-13, 2015). Under the talking points, the U.S. delegation states that its objective with Umbrella Group countries (United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Ukraine, Iceland, Israel, and Kazakhstan) is “primarily to ensure that our proposals are in the next iteration of the elements text.” Interestingly, with this non-EU group of countries, the U.S. outlines in the talking points that it is “having trouble controlling EU on expectations for legal force.”

This cable from Secretary of State John Kerry describes the earlier Geneva Climate Change Conference where participants prepared negotiating text for the upcoming climate change talks in Paris. It also reviews the principal issues for negotiation and directs embassies to forward information and requests for support on host country emission reduction commitments. According to Kerry, Geneva was successful in that it “fulfilled its mandate” to create a draft negotiating text, but the text was “lengthy and duplicative, and not one word agreed.” In fact, he said, the text includes “a large number of proposals that we would not be able to accept.” The cable summary ends by “encouraging Parties to bring forward ambitious and transparent INDCs by June 2015, if at all possible.” On the legal nature of the agreement, Kerry asserted that the U.S. “publicly” could not advocate for a “legally binding agreement” despite favoring language that had some legally binding provisions. Any proximity to “legally binding” language could “be misunderstood by countries to indicate we want a fully legally binding set of obligations.” If that was the case, the agreement would have to be sent to the Senate for ratification, where it would inevitably fail to pass in a divided U.S. Congress.

Secretary of State John Kerry forwards background information and talking points from Special Climate Envoy Todd Stern for use in discussions with host country officials and the media on climate negotiations in Paris. According to the cable, “this communications package is intended for Chiefs of Mission and staff for their use in engaging with host country counterparts and the media on climate negotiation issues” in the lead-up to Paris. The cable was sent to all diplomatic and consular posts, an indication of its high level of importance going into the COP. Under the “Key Players” section, various information is redacted due to national security concerns (FOIA exemption B1), such as information about China, BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) countries, and Island nations.

This cable from the United States Mission to the European Union to Secretary of State Kerry examines the European Parliament's possible role in shaping the outcome of the Paris climate change talks given the requirement that it consent to international agreements signed by European Union. The cable notes that the EP’s role during this conference is “expected to be of higher importance than in previous climate summits.” Worried that the EP might advocate that “the Paris agreement should be legally binding,” the sender of the cable states that the European Commission “would not be bound by the Parliament’s position and could choose to ignore it during the negotiations.”

In a postmortem of the June 2015 Bonn Climate negotiations, Secretary Kerry writes to the Environment, Science, and Technology Collective (likely encompassing all State Department environmental diplomacy offices) stating that “progress was slow…and deliberate” but “important.” He also reviews the schedule of negotiations leading to the Paris conference and discussions on emission-reduction targets, mitigation ambition, deforestation, and developing country biennial reports. Kerry admits that with only “five months of negotiations remaining before COP-21, Parties are unwilling to give up their positions,” but the “United States and many other developed and developing countries are pushing for the process to move quickly.” Nonetheless, Kerry concludes that “it is critical we make substantial progress at our next session in August if we are to achieve a successful outcome in Paris.”

Like Document 10, Document 11 provides a postmortem on climate talks in August and September 2015 in Bonn, stating that “the United States is cautiously optimistic about the negotiations going forward.” Notably, co-chairs of the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP) were given a mandate to reduce the earlier “Geneva Negotiating Text” to a shorter version for the next session in October. Overall, all parties recognize “the dearth of negotiation time between now and the Paris COP,” ultimately prompting them to agree to “develop a new, much shorter negotiating text.”

This cable summarizes efforts at climate change talks in Bonn to reach agreement on negotiating text for Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris. The document provides a snapshot of “the last official negotiation session before the Paris meeting” in December. According to Secretary Kerry, “talks got off to a rocky start when the G77 and China (G77)…initially refused to work off of the ADP co-chairs’ negotiating text.” Although much of the session was spent clarifying revised text, the text going into Paris was “not far from where most Parties assumed we would be in the penultimate meeting of the negotiations.” In this last negotiating session, the main contentious issues were climate finance (from the U.S. perspective, the delegation reaffirmed its pledge to provide climate finance but were “not able to accept new, legally-binding obligations to provide climate finance, quantitative finance targets...or the idea that climate finance will continue to scale up in perpetuity)”; loss and damage; mitigation ambitions; and status of INDC submissions. Interestingly, one section of the cable discusses the “Emergence of G77 as a Unified Bloc,” but the entire section is redacted under FOIA exemption B1.