That is before they put forth an even closer-to-final document by noon on Saturday. Although staff negotiators have been hashing out the text since Sunday, foreign ministers, including Secretary of State John Kerry, will arrive to start high-level talks by this weekend. The new documents are intended to clear away the clutter and set the stage for high-level negotiations.
But as the text becomes more streamlined, the fault lines will become more stark: India and other poor countries demand that the United States and the developed world agree to language that would legally bind them to spending more public funds on clean technology in the developing world. The United States demands aggressive outside oversight of other countries’ emissions reductions. Those fights will be at the heart of the talks, and they could determine how the world responds to climate change in the future.
Still, the good will surrounding the effort to reach a deal remains high. And although there is still a chance that a wild card will block a final vote, observers think those chances may be lower than usual — in part because these talks are happening at this moment in this place.
The French have clearly invested an enormous amount of political and personal capital in pursuit of a climate change deal, and the shadow of last month’s terrorist attacks in and around Paris continues to hang over the talks.
"I think any country that would go up against France right now would be looked at so badly in the broader political context,” said Jennifer Morgan, an expert in international climate change negotiations for the World Resources Institute, a research organization.
That means there is more appetite for compromise than confrontation. Negotiators, pressing to reach a deal quickly and pleasantly, may take many of the toughest issues out of the text entirely.
One such candidate is deforestation, a tricky and complicated subject that involves paying developing nations like Brazil and Indonesia not to cut down trees for agriculture.
It is an important but contentious issue, and to pave the way forward for a deal, it may get eliminated altogether.
Observers are concerned that pushing to deliver a quick, clean document could lead to the postponement of many complicated but important legal processes, with a text saying the matter would be clarified later.
Those legal processes are what will give the deal teeth, and leaving them unresolved could weaken the deal. In the eagerness to get a deal that everyone can agree on, said Alden Meyer, the head of the Union of Concerned Scientists, "there is also a fear that we are heading towards the lowest common denominator.”
(New York Times)
