Rules guiding pollution cuts adopted at UN talks in Poland

Bloomberg

Envoys at a United Nations conference adopted a set of steps on fighting climate change meant to guide efforts to rein in greenhouse gas pollution worldwide.
The diplomats drawn from energy and environment ministries in almost 200 countries backed rules to implement the three-year-old Paris Agreement, which called for drastic reductions in the use of fossil fuels by the middle of the century. The decision covered technical details of the Paris deal, including everything from a $100 billion pledge to channel aid to developing nations to how to account for emissions cuts.
The deal leaves intact the global fight against climate change. The US participated heavily in the talks, winning a concession from China on accounting for emissions, even though President Donald Trump has vowed to scrap the accord. While the rulebook serves as a foundation for future action, many businesses and environmental groups said it lacked detail needed to spur the immediate action needed.
“We’re not going to be relieved of serious impacts of climate change in the next year,” David Waskow, director of the climate program at the World Resources Institute, said at the meeting in Katowice, Poland. Those damages, he said, may come in the form of “hurricanes in a different place from where they were this year or forest fires or drought.”
In a move meant to spur work on limiting greenhouse gases, the envoys thanked a panel of top climate scientists showing the measures needed to contain global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The US joined with oil exporters in resisting language that appeared to endorse the findings of the report. Island nations saw the report as a call to action.
“It really outlined how really quite quickly and dramatically transformation of society needed to be to reach that target,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University in North Carolina who was among the co-authors of the report for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Rising greenhouse gas pollution already has driven up the global temperature about 1 degree Celsius since the start of the industrial revolution, with scientists suggesting that current plans leave the planet on track to warm 3 degrees or more by the end of the century. That would mark the quickest shift in the climate since the last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago, and envoys at the talks expressed alarm that so little is being done.
The text of the agreement in Katowice calls for:
Developed countries to give more details on how they will meet their longstanding promise to boost climate-related aid to $100 billion a year by 2020, noting with concern the needs arising from more violent storms in recent years. All nations to submit final reports by 2024 assessing the progress they’re making on cutting emissions. Standards applying to all nations for measuring, reporting and verifying greenhouse gas emissions. A “global stock-take” of overall progress on meeting the goals set out in the Paris Agreement.
The envoys pulled out of the text much of the language meant to spur the spread of carbon markets, leaving that matter for a future meeting. There were unable to bridge a gap between Brazil and richer nations over how to ensure that nations both buying and selling allowances don’t count pollution cuts embedded in the securities as their own.
“Brazil, thwarted progress by insisting that they should be allowed to cheat the atmosphere — and their trading partners — by double-counting their carbon credits,” said Nathaniel Keohane, vice president of Environmental Defense Fund. “Such a loophole would undermine the integrity of the carbon market and contradict the basic principle that each tonne of emissions reductions should only be counted once.”