This month holds more critical moments than the average November. Typically, the federal budget is tabled in spring, with a vote usually within the next ten days. And typically, the annual climate negotiations, known as the “COP,” takes place in late November, often running into early December. They have never before happened at the same time.
This Sunday finds me in the throes of uncertainty about both events. For Budget Day November 4th, I will be joined in the “lock up” by key members of Green Party shadow cabinet, including our great former MP Mike Morrice, to read the embargoed budget. Meanwhile, I have now cleared all the obstacles to attend the 30th Conference of the Parties, opening on November 10th in the Amazon. This is the first COP ever in the Amazon, in the country where the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was born. It was at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit that the heads of 105 nations, the largest gathering of heads of government to that point in world history, signed key environmental treaties. The climate treaty was signed by all – from Brian Mulroney and George H.W. Bush to Fidel Castro and Brazilian president Collor. Bush refused to sign the second big Rio treaty, the biodiversity agreement, but did sign the UNFCCC and got it ratified through the US Senate. The negotiations and increased focus on climate started with the 1986 Brundtland report. Back then, the climate threat was essentially a future risk. Scientists warned, “If we do not act, we could see the planet’s glaciers in retreat by 2030;” or, “If we do not act, we could experience more extreme and dangerous weather events.” It was all future tense and the science behind the warnings was not treated as uncertain. To the extent the scientists were wrong, it was in under-estimating how much worse things would be and how much faster they would occur. From 1992 until now, we have burned more fossil fuels and released more greenhouse gases than between the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and 1992 when the world’s leaders agreed to take action to avoid “dangerous” levels of climate change. Ironically, when I recall those early steps, I think political leaders were more motivated to act to avoid a climate crisis than they are now, when we are living it.
(NOTE to dear readers: the “too long – too short” debate about GSM continues. I really feel the need to explain multilateral processes. A lot of “climate literate” folks do not understand treaties and protocols and COPS. Providing this background will make this letter too long, To avoid a primer on how treaties work, skip to where you see in BOLD “Start here!”)
Every multilateral instrument follows a process in international law. A predictable pathway, but each has its own bumps in the road. The big signing ceremonies are just the first step. The process moves from “framework convention”, to EIF (entry into force), to negotiating specific and more rigorous steps in “protocols” usually negotiated in Conferences of the Parties (COPs.)
Each treaty’s negotiation process includes agreeing on a ratification formula. Once a sufficiently large number of countries have ratified (through legal action by legislators back at home), the treaty “enters into force.” Every nation that has ratified is a “party” to the treaty. On a regular basis–annually for UNFCCC, every other year for the Biodiversity treaty–the countries gather in a “Conference of the Parties” a COP. A COP is essentially the treaty’s “parliament.” The treaty is not static; it breathes and evolves through its ongoing process, driven by governments. It is at the COP that more general commitments become concrete.
Let’s take the Ozone Treaty process as an example. First in 1985, the world negotiated the Vienna convention on ozone depletion. The convention parties agreed that the process had to be driven by science. As the ozone hole emerged, things sped up. By September 1987, the parties gathered in Montreal and agreed to specific actions. (I was part of Canada’s negotiating team in Montreal.) The Montreal Protocol set legally binding goals, allowing poorer nations to increase use of ozone depleters to allow for greater food safety through refrigeration, and requiring the bigger polluters, the rich, to cut sharply. These commitments were backed by penalties, allowing all countries to apply trade sanctions against any nation that violated the Montreal Protocol. Within a few years the requirement to cut emissions fast applied to all countries, Industrialized and Developing. Over the years the Montreal Protocol has added more substances to the restricted list, with specific legal instruments, like the Kigali amendment in 2016. As some, but not all ozone depleters are also greenhouse gases, the Kigali amendment and the Montreal Protocol itself, not only saved the ozone layer (which is now repairing itself), they were successful in avoiding tons of climate warming gases.
I know it is an awful pun, but the climate negotiations have had “good COPs and bad COPs.”
Unlike the ozone process which, thanks to the negotiation of penalties, worked a treat, the climate process was sabotaged by Big Oil and the emergence of the WTO. In national capitals, trade ministers with more clout than environment ministers decreed countries should never again allow trade sanctions to be used as enforcement mechanisms. So Canada’s position flip-flopped. In 1987 Canada led the charge for the ozone layer and a treaty with sanctions. In 1997 at the UNFCCC COP3 in Kyoto, Canada stood firmly against the very tool we insisted upon ten years earlier.
The Kyoto Protocol was to reduce emissions globally, with the end date of Kyoto targets being 2012. Its architecture was identical to the Montreal protocol, except for the critical lack of trade sanctions. Both were legally binding instruments. After the 1997 COP3, COPs focused on negotiating the post-2012 replacement for Kyoto. The 2005 Montreal COP11, was a very good COP accepting ambitious goals to be finalized at COP15 in 2009. That turned out to be the worst COP ever! Held in Copenhagen, on offer of a left-wing pro-climate Danish government, our hopes were high. But by 2009, that government had shifted from left-wing to right-wing, The Danish PM was taking advice from Bjorn Lomborg and the fossil fuel lobby. Some now think the fact the UN climate process operates by consensus is a flaw. But it was only thanks to the tiny island states of Tuvalu and Fiji that a really bad deal orchestrated by the USA and Denmark’s government was not forced on the COP. Standing against it, rejecting it, rescued the process to allow a good agreement to emerge years later in 2015 in Paris at COP21.
The Paris Agreement is also legally binding on those nations that ratified it, including Canada, but not the USA.
Some are also confused thinking that because the USA has now exited the Paris Agreement (as it also did in Trump’s first term, rejoining under Biden, and now exited once again) the USA will not be at COP30 in Brazil. But the COP is the conference of the parties of the Framework convention the US Senate ratified decades ago (UNFCCC). The US government will still be there, unhelpfully. And many sub-national levels of government, US states and cities, will be there, helpfully. At Glasgow’s COP26, the local US governments were the “We are still in” coalition.
The slow, halting global climate process is not achieving the results the world needs. As my dear friend, and author of the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, the late Jim MacNeill observed, “at Rio the Carbon Club was formed.” The fossil fuel industry mobilized to stop climate action, using every trick in the book. Nevertheless, the COP is a necessary process.
Each COP is a three-ring circus. Think of a bull’s eye. In the centre small dot is the real work: Nations negotiating with other nations. It is diplomacy. The next outer ring is a combination trade show, high level conference for think tanks and policy wonks, with a lot of boozy receptions, offered by polluters, Big Banks and Big Oil, at hotels far from the conference itself. The outer-most ring is civil society, youth, indigenous peoples, activists in the street. Civil society’s large marches and demonstrations help those trying inside, in the small central dot, push for better agreements. COPs held in dictatorships lose the benefit of actions in the street. The UN system has five geographical regions, and the COPs rotate through them. That leads to horrors like Putin being able to insist when petrostate Azerbaijan offered to host COP 29, the UN had to accept it. Russia vetoed any other location. This year is South America’s turn. With Lula as president and Brazil’s former Green Party leader Brazil’s minister of environment, COP30 is promising. We must move from ignoring the threat to holding polluting wealthy nations like Canada to account.
Start here!
COP30 in Brazil is an important COP. It falls at the ten-year mark since the Paris Agreement. The U.N. system, with advice from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirms the world is running out of time to avoid shooting past a two-degree Celsius increase in global average temperatures.
We are on track to smash the Paris Agreement goal, putting human civilization, and a myriad of species at risk. Too many nations have failed to file their targets and deadlines, and countries that have done so, like Canada, are failing to meet them. In 2015, under Stephen Harper, Canada committed to the legally binding target of 30% below 2005 levels by 2030. “Too weak,” I said at the time. Finally, under pressure from then US president Joe Biden, on Earth Day 2021, former PM Trudeau raised our target to 40-45% below 2005 levels by 2030. Still too weak. But it is now clear, Canada is not on track to meet the weak Harper target by 2030, while our newly minted PM, former UN climate finance envoy Mark Carney is slashing climate plans and programmes. Two weeks ago, the PMO confirmed Prime Minister Carney would attend the advance high-level COP30 meetings (November 6-7). On Friday, at the COP30 briefing for MPs, we were told PM Carney is no longer planning to attend any part of COP30. We were also told that both Ministers Julie daBrusin (Environment Canada and Climate Change) and Minister Steven Guilbeault (Canadian identity, Parks with a focus on the 30 by 30 Biodiversity goals) will attend, but both only for a few days. They will be heading home to Canada by November 14. It is in the second week of COP, which runs November 17-21 that key negotiations occur. Canada will be entirely absent at the level of Government MPs or ministers.
Prime Minister Carney cares so little about climate that he chose November 4 for his big budget reveal, with every single one of his MPs being required to be in Ottawa for the budget vote. As a technical sidenote, due to COVID, MPs can now vote without being physically present in Ottawa. We can vote from anywhere in Canada–but not at all from outside of Canada.
The budget vote is clearly going to be close. No one in Opposition knows what will be in the budget. The Liberals need three votes from non-Liberal MPs to pass the budget. As you can imagine, reporters want to know how I wilt vote. I need to read it first! But I know I cannot vote for a budget that throws billions to fossil fuels, Big Oil or pipelines. But I have a real dilemma. Not only do I wonder how I should vote – knowing no one wants an election – I wonder IF I can vote. If I go to COP, I will be there a scant few days before having to head back to Ottawa. My one “out” would be if , once I know if I am a vote for or against the budget, I can pair my vote with another MP who would vote the other way, so if we are both absent, we cancel each other out.
As you can imagine, there are so many contingencies, eventualities and tricky eddies to navigate as I look to next Sunday and my next letter to you!!
For now, as I finish this letter on a Saturday, I hope for the source of a potential national point of happiness. Believe it or not, I am all caught up int the World Series. Go Jays!
And I will be telling the media next week how entirely unacceptable it is that Prime Minister Mark Carney is forcing Canada to skip this key COP. Not an encouraging sign about what awaits our climate policies on November 4!
Love to all,
Elizabeth