Morning update: fossil fools

Posted on 16. Dec, 2009 by adoptanegotiator in U.S.A., bits

Forgive the shaky penmanship (or typos) here–I’m dealing w/ little sleep after a night of riveting (er…not so much) negotiations. The U.S. annoyed a lot of folks late, late last night, when the LCA session finally kicked off around 1am, but got pretty immediately delayed after the US strongly opposed the 1(b)i part of the text, the session finally started in earnest at around 5am. It quickly became (wouldn’t you know?) a drafting session.

The new text wasn’t taken too favorably by Jonathan Pershing, representing the American position. He argued that none of the proposals inserted in the text earlier in the year were noted in the Chair’s text.

So for a couple of hours (which would’ve been twilight hours if we’d been at any lower latitude), the text was negotiated. Pershing bracketed pretty much the entire text, upset that there were numbers instead of X’s and insisting on X’s to go on to the COP. So now there’s a sloppy, heavily bracketed text going on to the Ministers. Not sure how this will go over. If they let us in anywhere today that’ll be interesting to follow.

Also, for what it’s worth, the US got it’s 2nd straight Fossil today. Actually–two of them. Check it:

THIRD: US and Colombia
Colombia and the United States received the 3rd place Fossil of the Day award for moving the process backwards on the REDD text. Instead of deleting and merging text, Colombia and the US added and divided text. This led to a chain reaction of text edits and expansion, causing a 3 page text on REDD to blow up to a 7 page text. Now the text reaching ministers has nothing settled. Overall, there was a softening in the text–a big step backwards for what has been, up to now, a fairly positive process on REDD at COP15. While we want to get this car into gear, reverse wasn’t the gear we were thinking of.

FIRST: United States
After staying clean during all of last week, The United States took home another first place Fossil of the Day Award today. This one is for being the only industrialized country to block ‘bunker finance’ — the idea that you could pass measures that cut emissions from international aviation and shipping (’bunker fuels’, in the UN jargon), and in doing so raise revenues to fund adaptation and mitigation in developing countries.