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A eulogy for Marco Rubio’s political career

by KyleKeegan0 Posted on March 16, 2016

A eulogy for Marco Rubio’s political career

By on 15 Mar 2016commentsShare

Little Marco! O, the waterfalls we shed for your departure!

Senator Rubio! How we weep for your consistency.

When the climate changed, Marco, you refused to do the same. We don’t remember you voting much at all in the Senate, but when you did, we remember you voting against an amendment that said human activity significantly contributes to our climate woes. “The climate is changing and one of the reasons why the climate is changing is the climate has always been changing,” you trumpeted. You were steadfast: a Florida coastline refusing to be swallowed by the rising seas of scientific consensus.

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“America is not a planet,” you once sighed. There was nothing we could do to change the climate, you explained. And there was nothing we could do to change you.

You pointed to China’s coal, to the fallacy of economic and environmental tradeoffs, to governmental overreach of the sordid left. You supported Keystone XL and lifting the crude export ban. You were the climate bad boy: the Daniel Desario we knew we shouldn’t hang out with — but you were just so dangerous. Like February 2016, you were just so hot.

Mere days before your dear departure from the race, you doubled down. The 21 Floridian mayors’ letter begging for reason on climate was met only by your trademark dismissal thereof. You always sounded so convincing! You teased and toyed with Jake Tapper: “I think the fundamental question for a policymaker is, is the climate changing because of something we are doing, and if so, is there a law you can pass to fix it?” There were plenty of laws that would do exactly that, but you preferred the rhetorical question. Denialism had such a palatable face with you on the stage. We wanted to believe.

And now you leave us bitter. Climate denial in the remaining Republican pool sports a different mask; a mask wearing a zanier expression than yours ever did.

¡Marcito! Your interventionism terrified us all, but your Spanish was so smooth. You disagreed with abortion, even in cases of rape — but you did have that one polished October jab against Jeb. “Donald is not going to make America great,” you said. “He is going to make America orange!” And now, sweet Marco, sad clown: You only make America blue.

Readers! Mourners! A man’s presidential hopes have faltered! He has traveled far and wide; he has sweat torrentially. But let us dispel with the notion that the wanderer is lost. Let us dispel once and for all with this fiction that Marco Rubio doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is pulling himself up by his chic boot-zips and dusting the cobwebs from his Senate seat. Until, of course, he breaks our heart again, in 2017.

Marco Rubio is survived by the Zodiac Killer, the Frontrunner Who Shall Not Be Named, and his extraordinary, unforgettable glitch.

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A eulogy for Marco Rubio’s political career

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Wanna See What Happens When You Rely on the Fossil Fuel Sector and Slash Taxes?

by Myrna Posted on March 9, 2016

Check out Louisiana. Andrew Cline/Shutterstock The state of Louisiana has fallen on hard times, and its situation offers some hard lessons. First, don’t let a right-wing ideologue cut your budget to the bone. Second, don’t hang your whole economy on fossil fuel extraction. The Washington Post reports on the state’s budget crisis: Already, the state of Louisiana had gutted university spending and depleted its rainy-day funds. It had cut 30,000 employees and furloughed others. It had slashed the number of child services staffers … And then, the state’s new governor, John Bel Edwards (D), came on TV and said the worst was yet to come. … Despite all the cuts of the previous years, the nation’s second-poorest state still needed nearly $3 billion — almost $650 per person — just to maintain its regular services over the next 16 months. … A few universities will shut down and declare bankruptcy. Graduations will be canceled. Students will lose scholarships. Select hospitals will close. Patients will lose funding for treatment of disabilities. Some reports of child abuse will go uninvestigated. For eight years, under former Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.), Louisiana slashed taxes and played tricks to fill budget holes. Jindal claimed that the tax cuts he pushed through would promote miraculous economic growth and make up for the lost revenue. That didn’t work, of course, just as it didn’t work on a national level under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Read the rest at Grist. See more here –  Wanna See What Happens When You Rely on the Fossil Fuel Sector and Slash Taxes? ; ; ;

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Wanna See What Happens When You Rely on the Fossil Fuel Sector and Slash Taxes?

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Consumerism plays a huge role in climate change

by LorieStruthers Posted on February 24, 2016

Consumerism plays a huge role in climate change

By on 24 Feb 2016commentsShare

It’s easy to hate on consumption. It turns otherwise intelligent people into manipulable drones, leads to rampant privacy violations, helps people like Jeff Bezos and Sam Walton get disgustingly rich and powerful, encourages advertisers to shove garbage like this in our faces, and culminates every year in a tradition so degrading and horrific that it forces us to question whether we all really did die after Y2K and this is actually hell.

But here’s one more thing: A new study published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that the stuff we consume — from food to knick-knacks — is responsible for up to 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and between 50 and 80 percent of total land, material, and water use. So, you know, get that Amazon trigger finger ready, because you’re gonna want to do some comfort shopping after this.

“We all like to put the blame on someone else, the government, or businesses. … But between 60-80 percent of the impacts on the planet come from household consumption. If we change our consumption habits, this would have a drastic effect on our environmental footprint as well,” Diana Ivanova, a PhD candidate at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and lead author on the study, said in a press release.

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According to the study, about four-fifths of the environmental impact of consumerism comes not from direct behaviors like driving cars or taking long showers, but rather from sources further down our products’ supply chains. The amount of water that goes into a hamburger or frozen pizza, for example, proved much more significant than showering and dish washing habits. This is great news, of course, because everyone knows how easy it is to track products from the obscure mines that they sprang from to the local Bed Bath & Beyond (not).

To figure this all out, Ivanova and her colleagues used economic data from most of the world and looked at different product sectors, including supply chain information.

They found that consumerism was much higher in rich countries than in poor countries (surprise!) and that those with the highest rates of consumerism had up to 5.5 times the environmental impact as the world average. The U.S., they reported, had the highest per capita emissions with 18.6 tonnes CO2 equivalent (“CO2 equivalent” is a metric that rolls multiple types greenhouse gas emissions into one). Luxembourg had 18.5 tonnes, and Australia came in third with 17.7 tonnes. The world average, for comparison, was 3.4 tonnes, and China had just 1.8 tonnes.

So if you’re like me and occasionally use the individual-action-doesn’t-matter rationale to, say, buy cheap home furnishings from Target, then it’s time to face the music: Consumerism is killing the planet (and our souls).

So skip the mall this weekend, and go buy a bus pass instead. Then, if you really want to challenge yourself, see how long you can go without buying something off of Amazon. If you need some motivation, try turning it into a competition with your friends: Whoever caves first has to go work for Amazon.

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Consumerism plays a huge role in climate change

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2016 Is the Year That Voters Finally Got Tired of Reality

by merinenty Posted on February 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Jeff Stein makes a potentially important point today:

On Saturday, about 80,000 voters participated in Nevada’s caucus — roughly two-thirds of the total that came out in 2008….Low turnout in Nevada wasn’t an outlier. New Hampshire saw 10 percent fewer voters in 2016 than it did eight years ago. In Iowa, turnout was also down — from 287,000 in 2008 to 171,000 this year.

….Sanders thinks “the core failure” of Obama’s presidency is its failure to convert voter enthusiasm in 2008 into a durable, mobilized organizing force beyond the election. Sanders vows to rectify this mistake by maintaining the energy from the campaign for subsequent fights against the corporate interests and in congressional and state elections.

The relatively low voter turnout in the Democratic primary so far makes this more sweeping plan seem laughably implausible. Three states have voted, we’ve had countless debates and town halls, and there’s been wall-to-wall media coverage for weeks….And yet … we have little evidence that Sanders has actually activated a new force in electoral politics. If he can’t match the excitement generated by Obama on the campaign trail, how can he promise to exceed it once in office?

Of course, it’s one thing to say that Sanders hasn’t generated huge turnouts in a primary against a fellow Democrat, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t generate a huge turnout against a Trump or a Cruz. The problem, of course, is that Hillary Clinton would quite likely generate a huge turnout as well. The prospect of either Trump or Cruz in the Oval Office would do wonders for Democratic panic no matter who the nominee is.

Sadly, turnout is a red herring. The real lesson of this year’s election is that candidates have learned there are no limits to what they can promise. Campaigning is always an exercise in salesmanship, and salesmen always overpromise. This year, though, we have two candidates who cavalierly and repeatedly promise the moon without making even a pretense that they have the slightest notion of how to accomplish any of it. And voters love it! Trump’s crowds go wild over the idea of Mexico paying for a wall and Sanders’ audiences go equally wild over his plan to blow away the entire American health care system and replace it with the NHS. This is the year that fantasy sells, and it sells big.

The conventional wisdom is that this is happening because voters are uniquely angry this year and attracted to outsiders who say they’re going to blow up the system. Maybe so. But I’ve heard that story pretty much every year for nearly my entire adult life, and weak economy or not I don’t really buy it. What’s different this year isn’t the electorate, it’s the candidates. American voters have always had an odd habit of simply believing whatever presidential candidates say, regardless of plausibility or past record, and this year two candidates have tested this to destruction. And guess what? It turns out that a lot of Americans will almost literally believe anything. I mean, China bashing and Wall Street bashing have always been good for some cheap applause, but this year we’re hearing blithe claims about crushing China by taxing them to death and smashing big banks into little bitty pieces, and the crowds are applauding even harder.

Trump and Sanders have shown that you can take overpromising to a far higher level than anyone ever thought possible. Is this unique to 2016? Or will others learn this lesson too? I guess we’ll have to wait for 2020 to find out.

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2016 Is the Year That Voters Finally Got Tired of Reality

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Dot Earth Blog: What’s Missing at the U.N. Climate Panel’s Meeting on Climate Change Communication

by Myrna Posted on February 8, 2016

Three things are missing at the I.P.C.C.’s two-day meeting on improving climate communication. Read More:   Dot Earth Blog: What’s Missing at the U.N. Climate Panel’s Meeting on Climate Change Communication ; ; ;

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Dot Earth Blog: What’s Missing at the U.N. Climate Panel’s Meeting on Climate Change Communication

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China Baits the Forex Gods

by ChristoSlama Posted on January 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Yesterday:

Wagers that the yuan will slump 10% or more against the dollar are “ridiculous and impossible,” a senior Chinese economic official said Monday, warning that China had a sufficient tool kit to defeat attacks on its currency. “Attempts to sell short the renminbi will not succeed,” said Han Jun, deputy director of the office of the Central Leading Group on Financial and Economic Affairs, at a briefing at the Chinese Consulate in New York.

I suppose he’s probably right. Still, this has an uncomfortable ring of the kind of thing treasury officials tend to say just before a sustained assault on their currency demonstrates that even huge autocracies with lots of foreign reserves aren’t immune to market forces. Stay tuned.

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China Baits the Forex Gods

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Why North Korea’s Nuclear Test Isn’t Business as Usual

by NealAQPXdtff Posted on January 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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There’s still plenty of doubt about whether North Korea did in fact detonate a sophisticated hydrogen bomb on Wednesday local time, or if the explosion that triggered a 5.1-magnitude earthquake was a nuclear test more akin to previous ones in 2006, 2009, and 2013. Even as the UN Security Council held an emergency session on Wednesday, the White House said initial US findings were “not consistent with North Korean claims of a successful hydrogen bomb test”—something that would have represented a major ramp-up in North Korea’s nuclear capabilities.

But this test was not business as usual for North Korea in one important way, believes Charles K. Armstrong, a leading expert in Korean history and politics at Columbia University: “It’s not clear that they are really interested in using this as a negotiating tactic.”

That diverges somewhat from previous nuclear brinkmanship from North Korea’s leaders. In the past, the international community has managed to cool some of the persistent tensions set off by North Korea’s nuclear tests and missile launches by offering energy and food. That, in turn, was aimed at getting the country’s leaders back to the negotiating table, on a long and fraught road to potential nuclear disarmament. Now, Armstrong explains, Kim Jong Un appears less interested in building leverage for negotiations than in bolstering his internal political clout—and after North Korea’s continued broken promises on nuclear testing, it’s not clear that the United States and its allies could even offer him more enticements.

“There’s not much we can do anymore to increase the economic pressure on North Korea,” Armstrong said in a phone interview Wednesday.

In any case, this time the nuclear test appears to be more geared toward amassing power for the young leader than engineering a way to get much-needed relief. “Number one: They’ve conducted this nuclear test for themselves,” Armstrong said. “Not so much, this time, for the outside world, but to demonstrate the strength of the Kim Jong Un leadership, and the position that they are a force to be reckoned with.”

“I think they are very serious about a nuclear program,” he added. “They do want to engage with the US, in my view, and break out of their isolation and improve their economy, but in a kind of perverse way, they feel this is the best way to do it. They want to negotiate from a position of strength.”

Other North Korea experts have expressed similar sentiments. “North Korea’s armament program is on its own timetable, and it’s not unlikely that every potential new stage is tested out as quickly as possible, regardless of what is going on elsewhere in the world,” B.R. Myers, the author of several books on North Korea and a North Korea analyst at Dongseo University in South Korea, told Slate. “I think the West needs to get away from the habit of regarding the regime’s nuclear tests and ballistic launches as isolated provocations timed to generate maximum attention.”

Nuclear ambitions are key to the regime’s identity, Armstrong says, and shouldn’t be discounted. “The pillar of North Korea’s sense of identity and power under Kim Jong Un is having nuclear weapons,” he explained.

One dominant theory is that North Korea provokes the international community with nuclear and missile tests to try to exact aid as an inducement to calm down. After North Korea’s first nuclear test in October 2006, the six-party talks between the regime and the United States, South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia fell apart, only to come together the following year when North Korea was promised shipments of 50,000 tons of fuel oil in return for a “freeze” of the country’s Yongbyon nuclear facility. But North Korea’s second nuclear test in May 2009 effectively ended discussion of US energy assistance to North Korea.

In 2012, Kim Jong Un promised his country would suspend nuclear tests and allow inspections in exchange for American food aid. But that also fell apart when North Korea launched a long-range missile later that year. North Korea again tested a nuclear device in February 2013.

This time, another key world event might be driving Kim’s decision-making: 2016 will be the first time in 36 years that the entire ruling Workers Party has met for a congress, hosted in the capital in May. “This is a very big deal,” Armstrong told me. “The nuclear test is part of the preparation in a way. It’s demonstrating Kim Jong Un’s strong leadership, and that North Korea is a strong and powerful state in the run-up to his major meeting.”

In this high-stakes game of nuclear chess, Armstrong stresses that it’s important not to lose sight of the North Korean people.

“What I hope does not happen, however, is cutting off of humanitarian aid, because this is really gravely needed by many millions of people in North Korea,” he said. “I would hope there can be a way found to move forward without making the people of North Korea suffer more than they already have.”

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Why North Korea’s Nuclear Test Isn’t Business as Usual

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Move Over, Monsanto: The Pesticide and GMO Seed Industry Just Spawned a New Behemoth

by MaricelGbr Posted on December 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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US chemical titans Dow and DuPont have agreed to a $130 billion merger. Once combined, DowDuPont (as it will be known) intends to split into three parts, including one devoted solely to agriculture. The announcement likely triggered corner office gasps in Basel, Switzerland, and in St. Louis, Missouri—hometowns of the globe’s two-largest pesticide and seed companies, Syngenta and Monsanto. That’s because Dow and DuPont are both sprawling conglomerates that contain massive ag divisions. Combining them into a “leading global pure-play Agriculture company” (as the companies’ press release puts it) will create a gargantuan new rival for those market-leading agribusiness titans.

To highlight the gravity of the deal, here’s a snapshot of the industry’s pre-merger position. After waves of mergers and buyouts in the ’90s and early ’00s—coinciding with the emergence of genetically modified seeds—the global seed landscape shook out like this:

The companies that rose to dominate the space—Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont—also sold pesticides, and lots of them. While these giant chemical companies’ rationale for moving into GM seeds was to diversify away from reliance on peddling bug- and weed-killing chemicals, the two business lines always had a certain synergy. That’s because the era’s blockbuster GM trait was herbicide resistance—the companies engineered corn, soybean, and cotton varieties that could thrive even when they’re doused with these companies’ own branded herbicides. The rapid adoption of these crops gave rise to a plague of herbicide-resistant weeds, a boom in herbicide use, and a new iteration of crops, including ones from Monsanto and Dow, engineered to resist multiple herbicides.

Earlier this year, Monsanto made a bold, sustained push to buy out its rival Syngenta. The combined company would have been truly enormous, controlling something approaching a third of both the seed and pesticide markets (see charts here). Syngenta’s management ultimately fought off the bid in August, but rumors of coming mergers and buyouts in the agribiz sector have swirled ever since. With the Dow-DuPont deal, those prophecies have proven thunderously true. The new firm will mash up DuPont’s seed heft with Dow’s fat share of the pesticide market. Let’s call it DowDuPont Agri. Here’s a sketch of its girth, made by crunching numbers in the above charts. Antitrust regulators may shave the final company a bit—DuPont and Dow both sell corn seeds, for example, and there is speculation that Dow’s relatively small corn seed business might have to be sold off.

Note that in this scenario, the same three mega firms—Monsanto, Syngenta, and DowDuPont Agri—will control more than half the global seed market and nearly half the pesticide market. The GMO seed industry once vowed to wean industrial agriculture off its reliance on pesticides. But as I wrote in May, when the globe’s biggest seed company (Monsanto) was hotly pursuing marriage with the globe’s biggest pesticide maker (Syngenta), the industry now appears to be betting big on a pesticide-soaked future.

And the new company will likely—unless antitrust authorities make it sell off overlapping business segments—emerge as a bigger seed and agrichemical player than the two that currently stand atop the market.

But I may soon have to rev up Datawrapper again and redo those charts. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the DuPont-Dow tie-up could “spur agricultural rivals to forge their own partnerships, further shrinking the handful of companies that dominate the global seed and pesticide business.” As recently as mid-November, Monsanto execs were publicly contemplating another bid for Syngenta, and some prominent Syngenta shareholders are pushing the company to reconsider its refusal to merge with Monsanto in the wake of the new merger, the Journal reported last week. “The synergies in terms of costs, distribution, and R&D would create huge value for shareholders and establish a dominance that would be difficult for any competitor, including a Dow/DuPont, to rival,” one fund manager whose firm owns Syngenta stock told the Journal. But the hottest takeover rumor involving Syngenta involves not its US rival, but rather China National Chemical Corp., or ChemChina, a vast state-owned enterprise.

There’s also talk of Monsanto making a play for the agrichemicials division of German chemical giant BASF, which owns a juicy 12 percent of the global pesticide market (see chart above). In the wake of the Dow-DuPont merger, I am left to wonder: What new, yet even more massive beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward our corn fields to be born?

See more here – 

Move Over, Monsanto: The Pesticide and GMO Seed Industry Just Spawned a New Behemoth

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A Diplomatic, Apocalyptic Game of Jenga

by JacobTonkin Posted on December 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Draft three of the Paris climate document is here, but it ain’t over yet. The delegates still have plenty of sleepless hours left.

And they have plenty of brackets to argue over, too. Those areas of disagreement—especially in the three seemingly intractable topics of finance, differentiation, and loss and damage. For the uninitiated, that’s paying for the future, reparations for the past, and whether the countries footing those bills are long term developed places like the US, or if they should include developing countries like China. On the positive side, the draft looks like it’s finally converged on a goal: To keep the global average temperature from warming between 1.5 and 2 degrees C above historic levels.

That said, this version of the agreement is actually starting to look like an agreement. Today’s bracket-count is a solid 50, down from 361 in Wednesday’s draft. “To extent that unbracketed sections of text reflect agreement, it seems like a lot has been streamlined,” says Dan Bodansky, a legal expert on climate change at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law.

The fights continue, of course. Rich countries don’t want to pay the damages climate change has already done to poor countries (heat waves, drought, sea level rise, etc.) Some countries want an independent agency or body to track emissions, and the results to be transparent. Other countries say that encroaches on their sovereignty.

But we’re close, right? Well…after French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius unveiled Wednesday’s draft, a bunch of countries sounded off with complaints about sections of the document that had been removed from brackets—which is to say, that everyone had agreed upon.

Is that confusing to you? Frustrating, perhaps? Welcome to COP freaking 21. See, when a section of text loses its brackets, that’s not necessarily because the countries have all agreed on it. In the negotiating process, countries and groups of countries wheel and deal over various aspects of the agreement. Some of this happens in large plenary gatherings, some of it happens in smaller working groups, and some of it happens in hotel rooms and hallways. All along the way, Fabius is keeping tabs. It is his job to interpret the decisions and write the agreement. In diplomatic slang, this is called “having the pen.” (I may have oversimplified the treaty process slightly. Ahem.)

That means Fabius can add or subtract brackets whenever he wants. Removing brackets tends to move discussions along. But Fabius is playing a diplomatic, apocalyptic game of Jenga. If he pulls too many at once, or demonstrates some kind of favoritism, the other countries can vote to take the pen away from him. “If I were the French, I would be concerned if push too far too early there will be a backlash and undercut your ability to do more,” says Bodansky. The trick is to calibrate the debracketing, so that the 11th hour draft is close enough an agreement that it gets voted in. It takes a very steady hand.

Fabius seems to be pretty good at this. Just about every other country’s delegates spend the first 30 seconds of their podium time lavishing praise on the guy. It doesn’t seem like the usual diplomatic BS. Then they get into their complaints with the document. C’est la vie. (Because I’m in France!)

But seriously, for a contrast to Fabius’ perspicacité, Look back to the 2009 Copenhagen climate meeting. It was the culmination of four years of negotiations during with the Danes had the pen. At the end, they revealed a document they’d written—and it bore little to no resemblance to what the negotiators had spent so long working on. Everyone basically walked away. And the world got hotter.

Comparatively, the French have been pretty canny. The question is whether they can keep pushing both hard, and soft, enough.

Excerpt from – 

A Diplomatic, Apocalyptic Game of Jenga

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Will the Planet Survive the Next 24 Hours?

by DenaeTina858 Posted on December 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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The next 24 hours could make or break humanity’s chances of staving off the worst impacts of climate change.

Negotiations in Paris for an international agreement to limit and adapt to global warming are in their final moments, after diplomats pulled their second consecutive all-nighter to crash through a few critical remaining questions in the 28-page document. The most recent draft, released Thursday evening, resolved one of the most important questions on the table: an agreement to at least attempt to limit long-term global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, a crucial half degree less warming than had been on the table before. For climate activists and diplomats from the world’s most vulnerable countries, that was a huge win.

Now, the question is whether the agreement will actually have the necessary tools to achieve that target. Many of the critical pieces needed to make the deal as strong as possible—most importantly, increased funding for climate adaptation in developing countries and a plan to ramp up greenhouse gas reductions over time—are still on the table. That’s a good thing. But there’s no way to know how many of them will survive the night.

“We’re in a good position. The sunlight is really in front of us,” said Li Shuo, a campaigner with Greenpeace in China. Still, he added, “we have tremendous risk that this very could be watered down tomorrow.”

The most important issue under debate right now is the “ratchet mechanism,” which would require countries to boost their climate ambitions incrementally over time. It’s an essential component for actually meeting the 1.5 degrees C target (or even the less ambitious 2 degrees C target), because the promises countries have made so far add up to about 2.7 degrees C—a level of warming that could ultimately prove catastrophic around the world. At the moment, the text requires countries to report their greenhouse gas emissions every five years. But it is still vague about how countries that lag behind could be penalized, how countries could be required to increase their efforts over time, and how exactly their reporting could be internationally fact-checked. Secretary of State John Kerry has been ambiguous on this point; he said on Wednesday that in the agreement, “there’s no punishment, no penalty, but there has to be oversight.”

Crucially, negotiators have also not agreed on when those reviews need to start happening. The view of most experts here is that in order to stay within the 1.5 degrees C target, the reviews should start as soon as possible—certainly before 2020. That way, there’s time to correct course before it’s too late. But the Chinese delegation has resisted that timeline. Last night President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke on the phone, according to Chinese state television; what exactly they discussed was unclear, but the call raised some eyebrows here about a possible wedge emerging between the two countries.

Some tension at this stage is to be expected, said David Waskow, director of the international climate initiative at the World Resources Institute.

“What’s happening here is the world is trying to craft a new way of collaborating,” he said. “We’re seeing the growing pains of that process.”

China and the United States were among the first countries to take a strong bilateral stand in advance of the Paris talks, when they released a joint plan to fight climate change last November. Many people I’ve spoken to here have said that this early partnership was one of the biggest reasons to be optimistic about these talks, since disagreements between the two countries has been a key reason that past climate summits have collapsed. So if that mood is changing, it could really improve the final deal in Paris.

China has yet to sign onto the “High Ambition Coalition,” a negotiating bloc that includes the United States, European Union, and dozens of developing countries. That coalition has emerged in the past few days to fight for what it portrays as the strongest possible agreement. I’ve heard concern from many activists here that the coalition is really just a way for the United States to seem like it’s on the right side of history, without actually taking very ambitious steps, while simultaneously painting China and India as the villains. (Eric Holthaus at Climate Desk partner Slate did a good job breaking down that dynamic.)

“Everyone is trying to hide behind the political smog,” Shuo said.

Meanwhile, the United States seems to be obstinately resisting language in the agreement that would make more money available for developing countries to expand their clean energy sectors, and for a compensation fund for the most climate-impacted countries. And negotiators are still squabbling over how exactly to determine which countries should be obliged to do what.

So now, it’s a waiting game. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my days at this summit, it’s to not even bother looking at the official procedural schedule. Anything can happen anytime because most of the action is taking place behind closed doors. That will continue through Friday night; the next draft of the agreement is due Saturday at 9 a.m. Paris time. At that point, it’s more or less up to the French officials leading the summit to decide whether to force an up-or-down vote or to let diplomats pull their red pens out again.

At the very least, it’s pretty safe to say that the chances of the talks totally collapsing are slim to none. Instead, it’s a question of whether the deal will actually be as ambitious as leaders such as Kerry have repeatedly said they want it to be, or whether it will be something more milquetoast. Either way, no one expects this agreement to actually solve climate change. But this is the most optimistic activists and diplomats have been in the 20-year history of these talks.

As Tine Sundtoft, the Norwegian environment minister, told reporters this afternoon, “There’s no real danger that we will lock in low ambition for decades to come.”

Master image: Triff/Shutterstock

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Will the Planet Survive the Next 24 Hours?

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