We're seeing. Hi, good afternoon. Oh, sorry, that was a little bit louder than I expected. Hi, my name is Sarah Ladislaw. I'm a senior fellow here in the CSIS Energy and National Security Program. Welcome to this afternoon's post-Durban briefing. As many of you know, the UN Conference of Parties recently concluded its latest round of negotiations in Durban, South Africa. And true to form, it was probably not as widely covered as the negotiations of two years ago. But in typical fashion, it was full of intrigue and suspense for those of us who follow these things closely and a lack of sleep for negotiators, which seems to be the precedent that they've been setting over the last few years. And we are very pleased to once again have Jonathan Pershing, the deputy special envoy for climate change from the State Department, here to sort of walk us through what happened during those meetings and how to think about them in the larger context of the climate change challenge and also provide some thoughts about what to look for going forward. And for those of you who tried to sort of decipher what happens at some of these meetings, it's not always that easy to get through. So we're really pleased to once again have Jonathan here to do that. And so Jonathan will deliver a PowerPoint presentation and some remarks and then we'll take some questions for a little while and should have a good conversation. So thanks for coming, Jonathan. Thanks very much, Sarah. It's a pleasure to be here. Sorry to be a few minutes late. One thinks that at the end of these negotiations, you then have a bit of time to relax and take things easy. But it turns out that's never the way it works. And the number of things that pile up while you're doing these negotiations is legion. There's actually quite a lot of other things going on. Many of you will probably be following some other not directly related but certainly connected issues, and particularly the negotiations and preparations for Rio, which are taking a fair amount of time, as well as things on sustainable energy, which are linked back in. So we set a whole series of other issues on the agenda over the course of the next year. And of course, the climate change negotiations are continuing. Listen, what I wanted to do in this next 15 or 20 minutes is to give you some kind of a sense of where we see the process going. And so I put some slides so that it try to help illuminate some of those particular points. But let me start off with a timeline. You've all seen various pieces here. It's kind of useful to think through about where we are. It's actually not very constructive when you think about the climate negotiations to isolate just the discussions on Durban. In fact, it's the continuation or the next set of conclusions that have been reached in a much, much larger process that really dates back now about 20 years. This particular timeline only starts with the beginning of the climate change negotiations themselves. You could start back a couple of years prior to that where the UN through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change established the idea of doing a negotiation. But give or take, some of it's been 20 or 25 years of a process that's now unfolded. If you think about the first step in that process, in some ways where we are now, which is the UN negotiations, they begin with the convention itself. And the convention really sets up a framework for what kind of action might be taken. It doesn't have binding obligations in the sense of legally binding missions targets. But it has binding obligations in the sense of reporting and sets up a framework for next steps. And so all the subsequent work really is characterized around that international structure. Didn't take very long through that negotiation, a little less than two years. It was adopted at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. So 20 years back is when this agreement was framed and adopted, entered into force in 1994. We pretty quickly realized that the dynamic of that was going to be insufficient. It framed what might be done, but didn't characterize specific additional steps that might be done to adequately address the problem. So in 1995, we began a new round of negotiations. That's that Berlin mandate phase where you mandate the continuation of the negotiations in what will ultimately become a new legally binding instrument that had the form of the Kyoto Protocol. Also negotiated pretty quickly, 1995 to 1997. And it took quite a while for it to enter into force, because a number of players not least the US at that stage were not willing. Ultimately it garnered support from virtually every country in the world except for the United States. That didn't happen there until 2005. So here we then have a framework and then underneath it one protocol. And in that protocol, a commitment for legally binding obligations, but highly differentiated. In which the annex one parties, the developed country parties, commit themselves to reductions. And the developing country parties commit to some kind of action, action unspecified. And all countries have slightly more elaborated reporting obligations. Fast forward and the US is out. US more or less said it was not going to do it under the Bush administration, not party to the deal. And it's fairly clear that without the United States and the deal, you're not going to have other developing countries, other major developing countries in. They'll certainly do things voluntarily, but there's no legal structure into which they'd like to put themselves if the US is out. And so we have a new round of negotiations that begins in Bali. And at that point in time, we agree to consider two tracks. One track is what happens under the Kyoto Protocol, because it has continuity. It has all the parties in the world, except for the United States that are members of it. And it has a set of dates over the course of which its obligations take effect, just to say those emissions reductions are 2008 through 2012. So what do you do with that? Where does that kind of go after 2012? You're missing the next step. So there's a negotiation on that. But equally clearly the United States has rejected it. And it doesn't have legal character in terms of emissions for other major emerging economies. And so there's a dynamic in which we'll negotiate a second track called, in this instance, the track for long-term cooperative arrangements, kind of a useless title. But more or less, it's the other stuff that you might end up doing. That proceeds in these parallel courses. And then the administration changes in the US. Then it comes along quite aggressively. And we come first to Copenhagen, and then to Cancun, and then finally to Durban. Copenhagen is in some sense a seminal event. I'm not aware, and people who have followed this issue for a while, I don't think, are able to articulate any other event in any other fora in which we've got so many heads of state actually negotiating an agreement. While the text itself was negotiated only among 40 heads of state, even 40 heads of state sitting around a table and negotiating a text is a unique occurrence. It just doesn't happen. You kind of think about what Yalta was, and that's half a dozen. You think about the Treaty of Versailles. The same kind of numbers. These are fundamentally different characters of agreements in which heads of state sit around a table and have a conversation. This is not least a function of the fact that the United States, with President Obama, participated, but so did Juan Jubau, so did President Lula from Brazil, so did Jacob Zuma from South Africa, and dozens and dozens of others. It's interesting also to think about why it got to heads of state. It wasn't as if negotiators didn't work on this aggressively during the period. They did. They didn't succeed. They reached no agreement. And it wasn't if, following that, we didn't have a process in which ministers got together and work aggressively on efforts and made enormous commitments one to the other and still couldn't agree. So let me give you a couple of examples. Todd Stern, who speaks for us as a ministerial representative at these meetings, was in Copenhagen and got no agreement. Henry Clinton, who's our foreign minister, shows up at this with a pledge to move towards $100 billion commitments in mobilizing capital and still couldn't get an agreement. Look at the kinds of things that are being put on the table and still no agreements. It takes heads of state and the other to overcome those barriers. But unfortunately, the heads of state didn't stay very long after they reached their agreement and the agreement was never essentially codified in the international negotiations. Enough players in the process didn't approve, didn't agree, and there was no consensus around the Copenhagen Accord. So it's taken note of, this agreement, this unusual, unique agreement was taken note of but didn't have political standing, didn't have legal standing in the context of the negotiations. It did a number of things though that are absolutely central and in many ways the story of Durban is fundamentally about the story of characterizing and codifying Copenhagen. The first was a goal to hold the increase in temperature below two degrees Celsius increases. Significant political statement. Provides mitigation commitments from both developed and developing countries. Actions on both sides. Targets for the one, actions for the others, commitments from all. It recognizes deforestation, talks about technology, talks about markets. It for the first time creates new expectations around finance, both in the near term, what might be delivered over the period of 2010 through 2012 and also sets expectations for what will be done starting in 2020 moving forward, this effort to mobilize $100 billion per year by 2020. And it recognizes that we're not gonna probably solve it and adaptation will be absolutely central. And after that, we ended up with all these countries signing on and taking on pledges underneath this structure. 116 countries so far, representing about 80% of global emissions have taken pledges under this agreement. So very, very substantial. If you wanna compare it to the Kyoto structure, have 116 countries here, 37 countries in the other. You have an effort that collectively represents 80% of emissions here. If you look at those parties to Kyoto that have made pledges under Kyoto, they represent about 30% a little bit less of total emissions. So really vastly increasing the scope and the level of ambition of the overall effort. And it includes all the major parties which was absolutely essential feature to enable the United States to join in. And they've made pretty significant commitments and you can kind of look at the ones that are on the list. And while they may not be narrowly specified, they're quite substantial. 36 to 39% below BAU, it's a number, for example, from Brazil. Or India, 20 to 25% reduction in emissions intensity by 2020. Or United States, which went through based on the language that was currently before us in Congress at the time, passed through the House in the range of 17% below 2005 by 2020 in the context of legislation. And even though that legislation did not move, we have not withdrawn from the commitment to meet those numbers. And in the context stays because we assume there will be other kinds of legislation that will certainly contextualize our obligations. We move to Cancun. So here we are, we had this set of agreements, we were in a platform, we had a structure and ultimately we hadn't reached a deal because we had objections. And we had objections from a number of players. We had objections at the one end from the OPEC countries who were never very happy with these agreements and in fact have historically objected to the agreement. But for the first time we had a suite of others. The one end, Copenhagen for those of you who were following it closely, remember that at that point, the group of 77, the developing countries was chaired by Sudan. Not exactly the bastion of liberal thinking. We ended up with an enormously difficult negotiation from the G77 in no small measure because of the way they led that group. They were very difficult. We ended up with objections from the states, the Bolivarian states of Latin America. Those were states that fundamentally were looking for a redistribution of global wealth. And because it didn't happen, they rejected the agreement in its entirety. And there were enough of these objections that at the end Copenhagen couldn't go and therefore we were faced with this potential complete chaotic fall down breakdown of the process in Cancun. And that led us to Mexico and its enormously adept and adroit handling of the diplomatic process. If you think about the dynamic at that point, we just come from this massive meeting, heads of state had gathered on unprecedented level and yet it did not reach consensus in spite of that. Mexico's left to pick up the pieces. And to a certain extent, Mexico is facing what the consequences would have been for failure had it not succeeded. Enormous diplomatic stress on a country. Because at that point, this was deemed one of the preeminent international agreements. It was deemed to be one of the harbingers for the kind of international process you might see for multiple issues around the world. And even with heads of state, it had not been agreed. So Mexico comes to the table and seeks to put the pieces back together. And I give huge credit to some of the key players there, not least Patricia Espinosa, who's the foreign minister, who was just marvelous. And her senior staff, including people like Luis Alfonso de Alba, who was the primary ambassador for this issue and is now the permanent representative of Mexico to the UN, very talented diplomats. And managed through an aggressive campaign of bilateral work and regional work to find solutions to all of these key issues. So when we come out from the discussion in Cancun, we actually have some texts that's really quite substantial. We codify the structure of Copenhagen. We maintain a degree of parallelism between developed and developing countries, and we provide not just a political agreement, but we now begin to write language to implement the various political texts. The Copenhagen Accords are a few pages, couple three pages long in their entirety. The Cancun document number is close to 100 pages. So we've moved away from some very generic language, very high level political statements, which is what heads of state could deliver into much more implementable agreements, which are more specific and they're on an array of issues. The vision, that's that two degrees, but it also talks about where we're going next. The issues of adaptation really elevated so they become the first in the substantive list of issues addressed in Cancun. The idea around this mitigation program that speaks in combination to the actions currently being taken and the expectations of those actions will be furthered over time. The questions of transparency, which have now risen to a very high level, and I'll come back to these in a little bit, absolutely essential for the United States. The notion of trust, but verifies when we kind of are very fond of, it certainly applies here, where the kinds of concerns we have about the operations of others are very, very high. They may say they'll do it, how do we know? What kind of confidence can we build into the system? These transparency, the reporting provisions, the monitoring provisions, absolutely central for those outcomes. Finance, the political agreements now written down with some new institutional arrangements. Discussion again on forestry, discussion on technology, all given weight and text to back them up. So that's what happens in Cancun. And then we come to Durban, so what's left in Durban? We have all these pieces, we end up with a process which is really quite interesting, we have a whole host of text, but the text is still relatively generic, even with the additional pages. It had said in Cancun, for example, we would develop additional material on how you'd report. We would establish a technology process. Didn't say how, who would serve on these bodies, what their remits might be. So we're now into that mode, and here are some of the players who helped make that happen. The left, you've got Jacob Zuma. Very different in his character from Calderon, from Mexico, Calderon was deeply immersed in these negotiations. We had a meeting of the major economies forum about a year before the Mexicans hosted the session, and he extemporaneously went off into a better part of an hour off, kind of off the cuff about why climate mattered, why it mattered to Mexico, why he thought it was important to take real action, his own personal vision of what the action should look like. Jacob Zuma doesn't live there. That's not his style, that's not his engagement. This is an issue which he took on, but really was himself not versed in or immersed in. And the same was true of the next person over on the right, that's Mehta Mashebani, she's the foreign minister, also not a substantive emphasis for her in her own career on climate change. And the woman next to that is Ambassador DeSaco. She is historically engaged in bilateral relationship. Her portfolio is the Americas, her priority is bilateral communication and relationships. She starts thinking about the real differences in how Mexico treated the process and how South Africa treated the process, very different skills, very different capacities, very different interests. And some new emergent outcomes in terms of other groups. The next group on the right reflects a new power block, that's basic, that group represents the ministers from China, from India, from Brazil, and from South Africa. And they're standing there next to the Secretary General of the United Nations. For the very first time at Durban, this particular group spoke formally as a block, spoke formally with agreements on what they thought the process should look like. Let's be clear, it's not that they've ever been silent, this is not a shy, retiring crowd. But at the same time, they've never before this meeting come to the table with formal statements preceded by series of meetings in which those statements were developed. This is a new outcome, a new emergent phenomenon in the climate negotiations, which I think we're gonna see in other places as well. In some cases, you might add Russia because the bricks are often part of the block. In this instance, these are developing countries from the climate change context, and therefore Russia's not part of the deal. And then you've got a host of other players, many of the ones you've seen before, my boss Todd Stern on the left side speaking for the United States. This time we had Argentina speaking for the group of 77, the block of developing countries. Connie Hedegard, who's the commissioner for climate change in the European Union. You've got there again, Jayanti Natarajan, she's the new environment minister, has been in this portfolio for only about six months, replacing a guy named Jairam Ramesh who was absolutely pivotal in both Copenhagen and in Cancun. He's not there anymore. She has a more populous perspective, many different concerns about how the process should work for India. You have Sheja Noir. He is the deputy vice minister of the NDRC, the National Development and Reform Commission of China. And then you've got Decimal Williams, who I've put in as a kind of a spokesperson for the Aden States, which collectively represent a block of aggressive actors and very interested parties to the process. Some very interesting dynamics unfold here. In some ways we have a debate which has been somewhat unusual players. Very often the end game is a function of what happens to the United States. In this instance, the end game was a debate between Connie Hedegard and Natarajan. Fascinating to think about the emergent dynamics of that consequence. And for two reasons. The first reason is at the end of the day, the Indians, speaking on behalf, frankly, have a much larger community, deeply, deeply concerned with the issue of equity. How do you think about the consequence to a country of relative poverty in the face of pressing problems? Should they be given a pass? Should there be some framing in which you say, yes, we know you think it's urgent, but we recognize you have development agendas which make it impossible to develop here. And at the other end, you've got Connie speaking on behalf of the European Union, a much more aggressive framing of what ought to come next. And unwilling to say, no, you can let it go because the consequence, as she sees it, from letting it go is enormous damages. And that debate was really central to the entire discussion in Durban. And in some ways, the fact that at the end of the day, the two of them were having that conversation was really quite fascinating. And you end up with these kinds of discussions in the upper right-hand corner. You see a picture with them sitting at the table. And this was an unusual meeting in part because of process as well. While Mexico ran a relatively tight ship, the South Africans had a much harder time reaching conclusions. And the thing ran on and on and on, and we could never come to closure on almost anything. This is a meeting that was supposed to end on Friday evening. We're still sitting in the room on Sunday morning. And what's kind of fascinating about it is two things. The first is that even then, ultimately, it was not the chairs that led to an agreement. It was an effort on the floor in which the debate really was, as I was saying, between the Indians and the Europeans around how to reach some closure with others, particularly the United States, throwing in language to try to find compromise. But at the same time, you ended up with the group insisting it do that and people had not left.  None of the principles had left by Sunday morning. That's kind of a significant statement about the importance that people assign to this issue. In some ways, the United States tends to have to leave later because there are no planes back to the US. The Europeans are noted for leaving meetings slightly early to catch the plane in the evening to make it home. They were all still there on Sunday morning. That's really quite stunning. And to me, speak to the kind of priority. And to me, speak to the fact that this is a process that is not only not ending, it's a process whose existence and whose formula, whose approach to the framing of issues is of central priority to countries around the world. That's quite a significant statement. So what were the key issues coming out of Durban? The first one was that we had to resolve this question of what happens to the Kyoto Protocol. It's in some ways attached to the question of legal form because on the one end, if you're gonna have the Europeans and a few others who agree to take on the Kyoto Protocol, what will the balance be for those who are not in Kyoto? How will you think about the balance for others who take on action? And that's this new thing that comes out of the LCA and some legal framework. The second is some kind of a roadmap and operationalization of the elements of Cancun and the elements of Copenhagen. And the third, in some ways overlapping obviously with both, but somewhat separate really, is the notion of the Green Fund, which had been negotiated in a separate track. We had three co-chairs of the Green Fund process. They included the Norwegians, the South Africans and the Mexicans at ministerial or vice ministerial level. And you had a process that was supposed to have been concluded in time for the meetings in Durban to give balance to the funding and the actions in these different dimensions. So let's just take a look at some of these individually. The Kyoto Protocol is now having a new period. We've decided among the group of parties that are members of Kyoto, which does not include the United States, that the next period was started in 2013. The specific dates of when it ends, not yet determined. That's some work that's to happen next. And the actual targets that countries will take under it still also not yet determined. So there's openness on the expectations of the numbers to be assigned under Kyoto. But we agreed to do one and we agreed it'll start on the 1st of January of next year. So that's a huge step forward. We spent really the last decade bickering about whether there should or should not be an extension to Kyoto. And the decision taken is that there will be. That means we'll continue some of the mechanisms. And that was a huge issue for many, many parties at the table, not least those who benefit from them by receipt of financing and investment, nor least for those who benefit from them by having reduced costs of mitigation commitments. So very substantial in that regard. The focus is very much on the EU because a number of other large countries, significant players have expressed either ambivalence or have outright rejected the idea of taking on a second period. Others gonna join, got Norway and Switzerland. Those indicating they would not join Canada, Japan and Russia. So this is very, very much gonna be an EU structure with a few additional players that changes the nature of the debate in some ways from had it been something that had achieved widespread participation and had brought in a much larger constituency and coalition. And that creates enormous pressure on the balancing piece which really is about the Durban platform which is this other component of the legal outcome coming from the agreement. It decides we're gonna launch another round of negotiations. And in this instance, this is a round that would be a protocol or a legal instrument and or another outcome of legal force. This was in that one of those previous pictures you saw the huddle in the corner with Connie Hedegard sitting with Minister Natarajan from India. They were debating this language. We were relatively agnostic ourselves but this was a huge issue for these two parties. Connie wanted to ensure it would be absolutely binding legal on everyone. India wanted to ensure that it would not necessarily be legally binding of a certain character on India. And we have language here which I think makes it much more legally binding than not but leaves a little ambiguity because you've got those three phrases. Nonetheless, it's a significant step forward and it's very clear that it includes all parties. It's to start the process of negotiation. We're supposed to start right away. We're supposed to conclude them by 2015 and the agreement is supposed to come into effect beginning in 2020. It's applicable to all parties. It doesn't mean some, it means all parties and it doesn't mean that some have legal and some don't, it's legal applied to all parties. And that was huge for the United States. There was no framework that we thought we could possibly agree to in which some countries would say it doesn't apply to me. As those of you who recall the conversation and the advertising campaign when we did the Kyoto Protocol may remember this big announcement and we had this picture of a map of the world and of scissors that cut out countries and as they would flutter in pieces of paper to the ground he would tell you the name of the country that was fluttering down and saying well the United States has an obligation but all these guys coming out don't. It was untenable politically. Hugely critical for the United States to be party to a deal that other major players also would be party to a legal deal and they are. And there's some things that it does not say. It does not speak to the issue of common but differentiated responsibility and respective capability because that's been increasingly used as a phrase to say I know that it says we all act but we are so highly differentiated that action can be fundamentally different. Yours can be legal, mine not. Yours can be real reductions, mine not. Yours can be with finance and I'll only act if I am paid, mine not. That differentiation has not been drawn here and we do not use the language of annex one and non annex one. We use the language of all parties acting and there is no content yet prescribed which means that we have a very open negotiation that we are about to start and to a certain extent this gives enormous latitude for those of you in this room who are thinking about other ways to imagine the future it doesn't mean any of them will necessarily apply it doesn't mean we would not use an emissions based structure it means that the door is open to the consideration of multiple opportunities and outcomes it's gonna be legal but it could legal with regard to inputs it could be legal with regard to technology it could be legal with regard to policies or measures or programs as well as with regard to emissions it's not constrained in the way other things have been constrained and this first year of our process is to launch an exercise to open up the door to what that might look like. We also began to work in greater detail on the issue of transparency and what we've got here is what developed countries do and what developing countries do they both agreed to buy in all reports one's called an update report because it's to develop a set of additional guidance but essentially we report on a biennial basis and there's an assessment and review that's the language that's used for developed countries and there's consultations and analysis which in practice means exactly the same thing and that's for developing countries and there's to be an additional registry that would be developed that would be a voluntary reporting tool to enable countries to get some recognition for actions they're taking if they're also seeking some finance or some support. Very explicit development of guidelines occurred at the meeting in Durban developed over the previous year since Cancun layout in quite a bit more detail what the expectations are for reporting and for processes of evaluating and reviewing the actions being taken central for the United States a huge effort on our part to make this work and agreement on this as part of the package. Adaptation clearly quite a central piece as well the end of the day we're establishing several new things one is a new adaptation committee we'll have a series of members that'll be under the conference of the parties provides technical support, input, technical analysis the idea is to help do some coordination between the bodies of the convention but at the end of the day a mechanism to try to elevate our understanding of actions to be taken to adapt to climate change. National adaptation plans we've agreed additional guidelines for least developed countries on how these would be implemented and we've begun to think through a program on loss and damage how do you manage the consequences of climate change how do you think about coping with the losses the financial damages, the cultural damages the ecosystem damages that are attendant upon it. More detail on deforestation discussions explicitly looking forward on additional guidance to a mechanism for red benchmarks for measuring reductions how can you have some confidence that what you're seeing is real what you're doing has benefit as opposed to really being lost in the wash or a green wash on the forestry side. How can you do with things like social safeguards for the first time we put some things in that are more explicit than we've ever had before on social safeguards, environmental safeguards for the management of land and land resources. And then some opening up on the financing side on the forestry discussion looking at multiple sources for support of finance bilateral and multilateral, public and private. Some new recommendations on technology we agreed already in Cancun to establish a technology executive committee we actually have had its first meeting that it states is represented on that particular committee by a guy named Rick Duke who's the Deputy Secretary at the Department of Energy in the policy office. He's gone to the meetings. That was the first thing we agreed that last year. We've also agreed last year that we would establish a climate change center and technology network. And this year we agreed on the RFP to solicit proposals from organizations about establishing that network. The idea in the United States' mind very much framed in the context of the request for proposals is that what we'd end up with is some kind of a virtual center that would bring many people together and provide access both to information about technologies, about good practice and potentially supporting those who'd like to go and develop them. And one of the things that was quite interesting on a trip that I took fairly recently was some conversations that I had with people in the Arab Emirates around what they were doing on the technology side. Many people may know that they've got an enormous investment in Mazdar which is kind of a green city program that they're working. A number of American universities actively doing work in the UAE. And they're looking at technologies that might improve urban development, transportation and renewable energy in particular. So Mazdar might become one of the nodes in this distributed network for this center and network structure. But you can imagine other nodes. I've had some conversations with folks at the International Rights Research Institute in the Philippines and you start thinking about the structure of adaptation technologies. And I've had some conversations with the folks in Israel who do some work on water technologies. Very different. And we've had some conversations with people who are doing genetic modification for crops that can be salt tolerant or heat resistant or drought tolerant. Those are all the kinds of things that again might enter into this network structure around technologies. And the idea is to build some kind of a center with a network that can spread and be quite wide. We'll have agreement and review of that at a meeting coming up this year but that was firmly established and reviewed here. Equally important is what's not here because there's been a huge debate about intellectual property. And that's not described, it's not proscribed, it's not discussed. The presumption essentially is that we have mechanisms to manage that. They're in the World Intellectual Property Organization in WIPO, they're in the WTO, there's no need for it and there was no additional language here. And that reflects the fact that the United States and many others push strongly to oppose it. We're continuing to do the work on markets. We're looking to develop some new mechanisms in the market structure. And we've designed or recommended a process to design something that would expand from the CDM, move away from narrow project based finance into sectorally based finance into things that might have more scope and more scale. At the end of the day, there's gonna be a work program that will start from now, but there had been a great deal of disagreement over whether it in fact should proceed, whether the only structure for doing markets was under Kyoto, the decision taken here is that no, the expansion and extension can be beyond that. And we also, there could be offsets that are either unilateral or bilateral in nature. So it's not exclusively one that we're gonna design that limits itself to the vision of the parties. Collectively, you can do things on a more modest level individually or bilaterally. We've agreed to move out and look at some sectoral approaches to significant ones that were raised fundamentally at very controversial that were moved forward. One is the question of agriculture. And the agricultural conversation has been tied for the last decade to questions of trade. And for many, many countries, the idea that you could actually talk about agriculture, even though it makes up a substantial share of global emissions, even though it's very much vulnerable to the changes in climate, there'd been a huge resistance to bring it into the conversation for fear that would upset trade balances, get into subsidy reform questions, get stuck in the WTO dialogues that many of us have been involved with. It's now on the table. And the second is an agreement to continue discussions on both aviation and the maritime sector. For those who are following both of these issues, they have risen to be very political. We're seeing certainly the consequence in the European ETS, the emissions trading system, of an effort to fold the aviation in and some indications are soon the marine in. These are conversations that will now be ongoing in the FCCC. And we have movement on finance. We've established a standing committee. It's a new expert body, it'll report to the COP. It's to have, in this instance, it's a board of 16 members. This is 20 members here, 10 from each, developed in developing. It's gonna evaluate flows in the financial area. It's gonna look at how you link the various aspects of the convention with respect to finance. Advisory to the full body. And we've agreed on the long-term finance work program. The idea is what are the options for thinking about financing through and beyond 2020. And we actually had some discussion, although it wasn't very elaborate and this is not really a negotiating matter, but parties presented information about the status of their efforts to raise $30 billion, depending on, of course, which numbers you use. A lot of parties would argue that we're doing well. Others would argue that we're not doing too well. So it really depends on which pieces you look at. The U.S. has made a huge effort to make commitments, notwithstanding the difficult budget environment. We've made this a significant priority. And we're looking at a combination of funding going through the Treasury Department for multilateral finance, USAID and state on the bilateral side, and very significantly, efforts that we've taken to mobilize capital in some other programs, not least places like the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, or OPIC, and the MCC, both of which provide investment finance for significant projects. We also established the Green Fund. That was that third piece that I put on my first list. And at the end of the day, we've agreed on its structure. We've agreed on a variety of different sub-elements in it. We've agreed to establish a board, a number of contentious questions about how tightly it interconnected to the conference of the parties, who ran the thing. It will have a degree of autonomy and independence, but it's gonna have a board of 24. People are beginning to nominate those individuals now. We expect the first meeting will happen in April. And at the end of the day, we're looking for a temporary secretariat, and then ultimately some choices by the board about a permanent location for the secretariat of this new fund. Importantly, it also includes a provision so you can get private sector financing, which we think will be critical to help leverage much larger sums of money available in the private sector. So that's where we are. That's the framework that came out of the meetings in Durban. So what's next in the agenda? We've got another meeting, right? So that's the process internationally. There are a number of things to be done. We've set ourselves up with a series of tasks. There are a number of working groups that are to be created. They now begin their work program. The session will be held in December in Qatar. I was just there. They've got a lovely, they've got a really quite expansive and very elegant conference center, but not a great deal of historical capacity on the climate change side. And so part of the question is how they will organize themselves. They made an announcement fairly recently that the person who will run the COP is not going to be the environment minister, but the person with responsibility for coordinating and sharing an interministerial process in Qatar, the former energy minister, and now I understand the deputy prime minister. So quite a high level moving forward from the country to help manage this issue. One preparatory meeting schedule, that's so far, that's in late May. That'll be held in Bonn. Normally in June, but the June timeline would conflict with the meetings in Rio. So we're having it slightly early. It'll be in May. At that point, there may be a decision to have a second session, perhaps in September or October. As of now, we just have the one. And there are a whole series of submissions that we're parties are supposed to make to outline what kind of expectations we have. There's something like 26 separate work programs listed in the decisions coming out of Durban, all of which have operational detail that we're supposed to carry forward. Standing up various committees, making operational green fund, managing the tech, looking at the adaptation committee, all of that's to move forward. And then of course, we have to structure and figure out how we manage this new Durban platform, which is the commencement of the next round of negotiations and what might be included. So what do I conclude from all of this? Well, the first one is that we made a lot of progress in Durban. If I think about the things the United States expected, the things that we were looking for in the process, I think we did reasonably well. We were looking for an agreement that would be inclusive. We got that. We were looking for an agreement that would move to the next level of next actions from all parties and that happened. We were very comfortable with the idea that if all parties did that, we too could participate and so we're in this deal. We're gonna work on this deal. We're gonna work on next steps for this agreement. We were very, very concerned that it provides flexibility and it does that. We were extremely concerned that it provides transparency and there'd be clarity about what countries would do and we got that. Others had very different concerns. China was absolutely unwilling to do another deal with the United States, so we have to be in and that we are, allows them to be and that we are in India is, allows other developing countries to be. So that inclusiveness was not just a function of what the US needed, it's a function of what all the major players need and it's certainly a function of what's required to succeed in solving the problem. It's very clear that there was gonna need to be additional codification and clarification on the finance. For many least developed countries, the issue is not what to do but can you get any support to facilitate those actions? And we got that. We got agreement on the structure for that next step on the financing side. For others, it's very clear that the finance will not come from the public sector, it'll come from the private sector and how can you leverage that? What kind of rules and mechanisms and what kind of financial incentives might this system provide to leverage that? And that's both in the green fund but it's also in the continuation of the market. So we've got not only under the Kyoto Protocol but also in this new development of new market mechanisms, the capacity to move forward on that side. And we've got very clearly commitments on technology. This was something that was absolutely central for India. There was no movement for them if we couldn't find ways to promote the development and the large-scale diffusion of technology. And there's now quite a lot of text that frames that but frames it in a way that's mutually advantageous. So it's not a function of what is India gonna get, what other people will lose. It's a function of how can you expand those markets for technologies that will make a difference on the climate change side. So those are the pieces that we did but it doesn't mean you can really sit back and relax because almost all the science suggests that the problem is getting worse at least as fast if not faster and the solutions are being found. So last year, one of the data that came out a couple of weeks ago was the ninth warmest year on record, 2010 tied with 98 for the warmest year on record. So we're just not going the right way in terms of the temperature numbers. Emissions are rising. Last year was the most significant rise of any year that we've been keeping track of emissions increases. And global peaking, if you follow any of the science has got to occur quite soon, if you're gonna try to stabilize at a level that will avoid the most significant of these damages. So it's not as if you can sit back and say problem resolved, we can now go home. It's a question now saying how do you implement what are the next steps? How do you carry these forward in some fashion that fundamentally maintains the equity discussions that we've had? Manages the substantial differences between economies and their expectations but fundamentally starts to bend the curve of emissions down and does so quickly enough that you avoid the kinds of damages that's the reason to have this negotiation to begin with. So thanks very much and I'll happy to take questions. Thank you very much, Jonathan, that was very thorough. As usual, I guess while everyone starts to think of their questions, I would forgot to remind people at the beginning, please do turn your ringers off of your phones so they don't disrupt any of the audio-visual stuff. One of the things I wanted to start with, one of the unique things that I think you did that people don't, especially in town that don't actually attend the negotiations, is sort of talk about sort of the dynamics. And I think a lot of times here when we're reporting on what's going on in the negotiations we focus on the US-China dynamics still, right? And so even in these negotiations, folks were looking at what role was the US playing and what role was US-China playing that you were talking about how there's all these new players emerging in the EU, India dynamic was especially important given this round. I wonder, since you've been around since sort of the start of this round of negotiations with the US coming in in Copenhagen, how do you see the role and the perception of the US as having changed from Copenhagen until this latest round of negotiations? I think the perception at least from the media on this side was that the US was in many instances being sort of put into a hard place as being sort of the component of the negotiations that was sort of pushing back on greater ambition or pushing back on looking forward towards sort of a long-term agreement and those types of things. And then that sort of China was coming up with some overtures to be a little bit more flexible than they're normally characterized as being. But I mean, seeing that you actually sat through it and have an inside perspective on that, I'd like to get your views on how you think the US role has changed in perceptions within those negotiations. Thanks, Sarah. Just a couple of observations about it. The first one is that I think that the case of the United States is even in the three years since our administration has come in has changed slightly. So we began with incredibly high expectations. The thought was that the president was gonna reverse all the previous policies in the United States that in one stroke of the pen, we could sign Kyoto and reduce emissions by maybe 50%. Why not? At the end of the day, it doesn't work that way. Everybody who follows policy with any sophistication recognizes that. The dynamics of any given country are constrained by the commitments that country has made, by the national circumstances of that country. It's interesting to me to see how little relative change there has been in really very many countries at all over time. It's not as if they don't evolve, they all evolve. It's not as if things are static, nothing static. But let's take a look at others that are also moving. The United Kingdom has gone from a government that was Tory to a government that was Labour, back to a government that was Tory. Perhaps one of the most original thinkers on this was Margaret Thatcher, who came in and set the UK on a pretty aggressive route. And then you came in and had a series of Labour governments that continued that policy, and now you've got a coalition government that's continuing that policy. There's a dynamic and a domestic constituency for that kind of effort that transcends a particular government. In the case of the United States, you can have very different views. There is no question that our administration believes this is a really important problem, and that's not clearly what the previous administration believed. At the end of the day, we have a Congress which is prepared to act in certain measured ways, and things take a great deal of time. And I would like them to move more quickly. We're working with them to move on certain kinds of issues, but they're making choices that limit what the United States can do in some arrangements, in some aspects of our work. And the world, I think, begins to understand that, not in their first flush of excitement, but after you end up with a series of programs and processes. At the same time, the United States is deeply engaged in this exercise in a way that we were not in the previous administration. And so what ends up happening, at least in my perception, and I was not in the previous administration, but as I look at this process, prior to this, you'd come to a meeting and the US would be presumed either not to be a party, not an engaged actor, or not even really present, silent during a meeting. At these discussions, the US is a facilitator. So the outcome with this big debate between Europe and India was a place that we were actually in the middle. We could support India because we understood the kind of constraints they had and we needed them in. But India was prepared to be in, it was just a question of how. And we understood exactly where Europe wanted to go. It wanted to go to increased ambition and it wanted a process that would be more inclusive. And we have, we're very good at language, we have some really talented language facilitators on our team. Those are people who can come up with words, who can bridge the difference and we can talk to both sides because we have arrangements and agreements and discussions with both sides. So in this instance, the United States was actually much more able to be facilitated than not. It does not change from the big disagreements. People would like us to do more. People would like us to be more legally bound than we have so far been prepared to be. People would like it if Congress were to say we could ratify an agreement no matter what it said if the rest of the world did it. It won't work that way. And people, I think, recognize that, albeit not without considerable frustration. Thank you, great. For those of you who know CSIS, you know our ground rules, when you get your microphone, please wait for the microphone because we are webcasting. Please state your name and affiliation and your question in the form of a question. And we'll start right here. Alden. Hi, Alden Meyer, Union of Concerned Scientists. Thanks, Jonathan, for very comprehensive and cogent exposition on the outcome of Durban. I expect no less from you. And I'm glad you're not sleep deprived like we all were that last morning in Durban. Two questions on the Durban platform for the bond meeting. I'd like to get your views and sort of the take of the US. One is on the notion of having an ambition work plan as part of the Durban platform, which presumably can look at ambition before 2020 when the new agreement would take effect as well as after 2020. There's gonna be a submission by the end of next month, a workshop in Bonn, in Durban, in Bonn on Durban. And this obviously was a key issue for the European Union, the small island states, the NGOs, to acknowledge the significant gap between the actions that are on the table and the two to retarget that our president and others committed to in Copenhagen. So what are the opportunities there for an ambition work plan? What are the challenges? And then more broadly on the overall work plan for the Durban platform, you've already started to see some relitigating in the media on what this outcome meant that the words under convention mean that CBDR and equity is incorporated. Maybe it's not mitigation commitments that are legally binding, et cetera. Are we looking at the possibility of an agenda fight that could take up two weeks in Bonn trying to decide what the Durban platform means? And how do you have leadership on this process the way we had from Jean Repaire, for Rio, and for Raul Estrada from Argentina, where you had a strong chair for the whole two years that drove the process and really broke the agreement? If we go with rotating chairs, develop, developing, is that gonna work? Sort of what's our views on the work plan and the leadership of the Durban platform process? Thanks very much, Alden. Just a couple of thoughts. The first is I think we're in the midst now of exactly those conversations. So I don't think anyone's resolved all the issues that you've laid out. They're clearly both immediate and urgent in terms of the timeline for submissions and what countries are doing, and important in terms of figuring out the process. We do not, for example, have any arrangement that's been decided upon for the leadership of the Durban platform discussions. It's a new process. We are to develop those recommendations. I think that party submissions will make recommendations about how that should unfold. And I agree with you that it was quite important, both with Jean LePère, who's the person from many of you who were not following this, who was responsible for the negotiations during the entire two years of the convention, a Frenchman with enormous multilateral experience, or Raul Estrada, who was the person who kind of ran the negotiations for Kyoto during the full 18 months of that negotiations. You had some continuity. We have, on the other hand, a much more evolved process than we had then. We now have a series of working groups that have standing obligations, some of which may dovetail or overlap with these. We have another process, the continuation still of the LCA, which has a chair, which has some elements that might be extended. We have decisions that we've taken around spinning off certain aspects of the work into various technical panels, like on technology, like on finance, like on adaptation. So we may have a somewhat different requirement for a single lead than we might have otherwise had. It doesn't fundamentally change the fact that we will need some mechanism to have that discussion and some framework and help to manage that well. That's to be one of the big issues, I think, that will be the topic of conversation in the run-up to and resolved in May in Bonn. The second piece, though, or maybe the first part of your question, really is what are you doing on the pre-2020 side and how does that link in? I think that there are two things that I would observe. The first is that there seems to be remarkably little will in the international process for countries to change their numbers pre-2020. There's some clarification that I think is likely to be taken, and there is some indication that some countries that have established ranges may in fact settle on something within the range that they would then be prepared to sign on to. It turns out that's more the case for developed countries than developing countries, many of whom have got a range that's 10 percentage points with certain conditions. Japan is even larger, Australia is even larger, so you've got a number of different ranges in there that I think might need to have some specificity attached, although whether it happens this year or next year or the year after, I couldn't say. But that's one piece, but you actually know what that is. You know, there's gonna be probably within that range, and so far that I've heard no one's come forward and said, don't worry, I'm gonna change my number, I'll get back to you in a couple of weeks. I don't think it's gonna happen. That leaves a set of additional questions. What's not covered in countries' agreements that they might bring in? Because that would be one way to enhance ambition. Could you do something on sectors, for example, in the bunker fuel area that's not currently covered? That's one proposal. Are there some gases that are not covered that you might bring into the equation that's not currently addressed, but it might be something that you deal with? So I think those are the kinds of things that are being discussed. Certainly that's in the United Kingdom, which has been a very strong proponent of some of these next steps in a technical way, has brought to the table, as have the island states. I think that'll be a big conversation, but those are the two pieces that I see in the first, not much likelihood of movement. In the second, an open question, and then even more, a question of whether it would happen under the convention, or that might happen in other arrangements that are outside the convention, but yield those kind of benefits for convention purposes. Hi, Lisa Friedman from Climate Wire. Yes, you look rested. Thank you. I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about how you picture the future. If we're leaving a world that has these two clear categories of one annex of countries that have legal obligations to cut emissions in another group that has much less clear obligations, what do you see as the thing that takes its place? How do you decide not just what US does relative to China or India, but what China or India do relative to Singapore or Thailand or Mexico? I know there's a lot of formulas out there. Do you think that a formula would work? Do you think that we're entering a world of just a larger pledge and review the way we've been going? And second, if you could allow us, we have a second question is on the elections. We have a presidential field on the Republican side of two candidates who've had varied opinions on climate change and two others that are climate skeptics. How do you see the international process under a president Gingrich or a president Romney? Should we take Jennifer's question also? It's great to hear from you. Mine is similar to Lisa, I guess, oh, Jennifer Morgan, WRI. I agree with you that in some ways we're in a new world and there's this opportunity with everyone sitting at the table, and you mentioned that it's a good thing for people in this room to be thinking about. I'm curious what you think particularly would be useful for us to be thinking about. I mean, there's the emissions approach, there's policies and measures approach, there's different ways of going forward or technology. As we all sort out our research programs moving ahead, what would be useful? Thanks, let me start with Lisa, your questions. I think that the first one is that what's next is something that's frankly much more like the real world. The real world in my mind does not neatly divide into two categories. This kind of ancient history in which the division of the OECD and non-OECD circa 1990 applies in 2020 is I think, it's not tenable. And even within the structure of the developing countries, I think about the range in that community, the notion that Korea still qualifies as a non-NXI party and therefore technically as a developing country as is Singapore. So I just came back from a trip to the Middle East and I was in Qatar and I was in the UAE. Qatar is the richest country on a per capita basis in the world, but it's a developing country. It doesn't have any capacity to act, but that's not true. And they know it and they're doing things and it's not a function of the action, it's a function of what kind of commitments they've ever appeared to make in part because of the confidence they could meet them, in part because if in many cases you don't have to make a commitment, why do so? So there are a number of dynamics that play out. I think that old system is just not one that operates constructively in the world that we currently live. So to me, the question is that you've framed it, well, what's next? And in my mind, what's next is probably an arrangement in which countries deliver as a consequence of what kinds of actions they can take at home and in the context of a larger global collective effort. And you iterate back and forth on those two pieces. So at one end, you take a look at what we've currently done and it's vastly more than was under Kyoto in terms of the steps that countries have prepared to implement and to commit themselves to. It is clearly also not gonna satisfy the problem and you have to iterate. So you look at what they can do and what they've been doing and you say, well, that's not quite enough, do more. And in fact, they do do more. That's what we got in Cancun. And now you evaluate the collective effort and there's gonna be a whole process of clarification and review of those actions and it probably won't be a new round of pledges till later in the decade. But at that point, they will have iterated against that and you'll then evaluate the collective new total that you've got and see where they are. And the political pressure is we should make no mistake being applied at multiple levels. So it's much harder for the big guys to get away and they're now no longer just in a G8 structure, they're in a G20 conversation where those relationships in the big players are absolutely central and clear. And at the other end, it's much harder for the small guys to get away. The notion that you're gonna have a process in which Singapore does nothing is no longer very likely. And it turns out that Singapore has made some pretty interesting commitments in the context of their pledging. So I think we've got a couple of processes that unfold in this new system that we're trying to design and the next steps in it, I think are gonna be ways to capture, to first find and then capture the benefits of joint and collective action. So let's take an example. One model is that you have a collective action because you can all do more if you're all acting. That probably is true. At the same time, we saw that it had constraints because people were not prepared to act in a common way. But they may be prepared to act in common ways on subsets of the problem. You might be able to find common action as we did in the G20 on the removal of fossil fuel subsidies. That's got a huge potential revenue returns as well as potential emissions reduction returns. So here's a way in which action is not universal, although with the G20 taking it, it may spread quite widely, but it becomes a mechanism through which you have agreements and instruments to drive change. The second question with regard to the Republicans, I have the advantage of knowing that they won't win because I have a perfect crystal ball. And so I don't have to answer the question at all. The President's gonna keep doing what he's trying to do now which is to work aggressively on the climate change problem. Jennifer, let me turn to your question, which is with regard to opportunity and what's useful. There are a lot of things, I think, that to me are relevant in this discussion. The first one is that I don't think we any of us have the right answers or understand the array of answers. So if you, collectively, the you in this room and those others who are working in the arena can think through what the options are. We've done a couple of internal reviews of what we did in the preparations for Kyoto. We had a period in the run up to Kyoto of a full year in which we considered an array of different choices, different ideas, different ways of framing the problem. We should revisit those. Some may now apply in a different way than they applied before. Some may be no longer relevant because the world has moved on, but we should revisit those. We should take a look at the things, for example, that were done, the Harvard product that Rob Stavins has been running, which looks at an array of different possible choices. We should take a look at the kind of proposals that are coming from some of the key developing countries. They've got some very different visions of where common action might be taken. We know there are gonna be constraints. We are not in a world in which there's gonna be a free transfer of technology irregardless of the IP constraints. It just won't happen. So we need to be realistic in our assessments, but we need to think through what those things might look like. And we don't only, in my mind, need to focus on things that would be universal. The convention specifically provides for agreements that are not universal in their coverage. We have language that says, subsets of parties may get together and do things jointly. Either through emissions trading, that's one mechanism, or through other policy actions. We should think about those. And we should think about the ones that might be done collectively because they generate better outcomes when they are done collectively. So I think that's one piece. I think a second piece, there needs to be a lot more work on some of the barriers. What are the constraints in which the world has been operating that have limited our ability to act more aggressively? Some are political. Can they be overcome with collective action or by focusing in particular areas? But some are technical. Some are things that if we design something properly, you could manage to do more than you are doing today. We should know those. Some are a function of finance. Are there ways to think about incentivizing finance to make it attractive to make these investments? What's the policy context to do that? Is it an enabling environment in the host country? Is it a question of available capital in the donor country? Is it a question of limits on financial availability? Why is it that this giant pool of capital is not going into these areas? Can you de-risk? Are there ways to manage leveraging? Those are all kinds of key questions. We could figure some of that out. We've got trillions, literally, trillions of dollars of capital to be invested. That all the modeling shows will be invested. We just have to steer it a little bit and a huge sum is flowing this direction which could make a huge difference for this particular problem at no net cost to the economy. It's just a different investment that the economy might choose. I think that's a huge opportunity. I think there's an open question about how we think about the larger geopolitics. The question about the relationships between countries. I think that the United States has been very concerned about the kinds of competitiveness issues that clearly lie in our future if we don't do a very good job. One of the things that I was struck by was at the World Future Energy Summit. That's why I was in Abu Dhabi. And in that particular summit, there were hundreds and hundreds of booze at this massive convention center. Huge, beautiful, brand-new convention center. Hundreds of booze of people showing their wares on a variety of energy efficiency and renewable technologies. So I've been working on this problem for a really long time. Back in the 70s, a great deal of the technology on solar was coming out of most major American universities and institutions. At this booth, or these booths that I was seeing, the vast majority of that technology, much of which was developed here, is now for sale by non-American companies. There are very, very few American companies selling the stuff that was developed here three decades ago. And that's a function of the domestic circumstances. It's not as if they got robbed. A lot of them sold it for a very nice profit. But at the end of the day, we are not capitalizing on that. And others are, and that leaves us very fearful in many ways as a nation about how we can take advantage of that or worried that if we don't, we'll be beaten, and therefore maybe we shouldn't engage. And I think we have to figure out why that constraint is there and how we can take advantage of what could be a huge market. And potentially big opportunities for investment in this new direction. What can we do about that? And how can we do it cooperatively and collaboratively in a way that advances both parties' concerns while retaining and addressing the kinds of constraints that we really operate under? So those are the kinds of things that I think we could really usefully work on. Yeah. Yeah. Over there. I wanted to throw into the hopper. You had mentioned at the beginning of your talk there's some of the other events that are going on this year, like Rio Plus 20, and there's anything you wanted to mention about things you think that are interesting to watch there. We'd appreciate knowing. Thank you very much. I'm Diane Perlman. I'm with the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason. And I was also in Copenhagen with mediators beyond borders. And were you aware of their presence? And we're trying to get language in about mediating conflicts, which is to the extent that conflicts remain and are not mediated. It's harder to solve the problem. So my first question is about mediation. And then speaking of conflict in Copenhagen, there was a Fossil of the Year award given to Canada for the tar sands. And also I'd like to ask about the tension between domestic politics. And I'm very grateful to Obama for not being pushed into voting for the Keystone Pipeline. And I wonder whether they were talking about it there. And I'm glad that you're confident that the Republicans aren't going to win, but they can do a lot of damage with the rhetoric and things that they're saying. A lot of like, you know, really misinformation about jobs and the environment and the ridiculing. You know, just the rhetoric is really dangerous. And I'm wondering what anyone's doing to enlighten people and to speak to the people who are suckered into that also. Okay. And then right up here. Brian Beery, Washington correspondent for EuroPolitics. Quick question on aviation emissions. As you know, your boss, Secretary Clinton has written to the EU basically telling them to stop extending their emission trading system to aviation. And it's clear now the State Department is backing the airline industry over the environmentalists. Is that something that's going to come into the UN talks or do you think is that going to ring fenced off in some other forum? And yeah, just basically aviation emissions and possibly shipping emissions. How is that going to come into the future negotiations? Thanks very much. On the conflict resolution side, there are a couple of relevant pieces. The first of which is that there has been under the Kyoto Protocol, of course, a discussion on compliance and non-compliance. And one of the elements that's been there is an effort to try to promote compliance without penalties, to look at facilitative mechanisms that might assist in countries moving forward. Some countries have begun to take advantage of that, but very few. And I think that was an idea that's very much framed in the context of a legally binding obligation for an outcome, which some people have or have not met. You actually won't know under Kyoto until 2013 when there's been some assessment of where things stand. But there's a second part, which is around disagreements between individual parties. Those so far have been managed with the negotiations, often messily, often with difficulty, but at the end of the day, the existence of agreements reflects that kind of compromise. And it reflects the compromise that is often taken with quite a lot of movement on the part of some countries who may not like it very much, but the outcome is more important than any particular element of the outcome. It's very interesting in a process in which consensus is the rule about how relatively easy it is to stop something from moving forward. And we certainly saw that in the context of Copenhagen, where we had the vast majority of countries agreeing, but there were a handful, not a trivial number, my guess is 20 to 25 out of the virtually 200, so a non-trivial number who stopped it. When we only had one, which was the case in Bolivia with Cancun, it does not get stopped. And here we had people who weren't happy, but no one wanted to go down the route of blocking the outcome. So we've been progressively moving back towards the notion that consensus doesn't have to mean everybody agrees, it means you don't block the result. None of that has led to kind of a mediation conversation. In essence, I think you could argue that these small working group discussions are a facilitated mediation of a certain type, but they don't usually take the form of the more formal mediation that people I know who do mediation engage in. I don't know that that's going to change anytime soon. I think these are national positions, and they have historically not been mediated the way bilateral things have been done or other negotiations have been done. So that's an open question. I'm not seeing it, but I could imagine some cases where it could be useful. The second question is with regard to the tar sands and the fossil awarded to Canada. My sense is that fossils get awarded, we have ourselves received any number of them. We certainly look along when they come along and see why they were awarded, so people pay attention to them. My own sense is that the community at large, the environmental community is very concerned around the emissions attendant upon those tar sands. At the end of the day, Canada has made it quite clear that it sees that as a national development priority. So we're in the midst of a conversation about how one does that. At the moment, the existing track of the Keystone pipeline was not one that was acceptable, and so you saw the recommendations that we made in moving that forward. But there'll be other submissions, and my guess is, and those may be acceptable. I think that's an open question as to how those work out. So I think the debate in a larger sense is a microcosm of a question of, how could you really reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Is that a tenable future as you go down the route? Listen, a relatively small share of the emissions of the tar sands come from the production of the tar sands. The vast majority come from the consumption of the fuel the tar sands produce. And in that context, what are those solutions? Well, they're around changing your transportation infrastructure. Those are things around looking at alternative technologies. And if we got there, then the demand would fall off and those tar sands might not be necessary. So there's a set of different debates that we're yet having that need to be about a much more fundamental question. How do you reduce emissions from fossil fuels collectively, maybe not individually for a particular technology? So I think that's a larger discussion. Hopefully, the kinds of things we're doing in the international process will help with that. Hope of the kind of things the president has done with efficiency standards will help with that. Hope the kind of things that Europe is doing will help with that. So that dynamic is, I think, where we have to go. The other question was really about what's happening with the European trading system and aviation. My sense is that in the near term, it probably won't spill over a great deal into the negotiations themselves. So that was the narrow question. Will there be an immediate spillover? I don't think so. I think there's some discussion of aviation in the negotiations, but the vast majority of the international conversation has been in the context of ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organization. And I think it probably mostly stays there. I think there's a separate question as to whether or not there should be spillover and what kind of longer term consequences will be between the United States and the EU on this particular issue. And the first one is that I think that the ICAO is actually a pretty good place to do it. One of the reasons I think that is that ICAO has historically been very clear about not creating differences between countries. The notion that you'd have a different treatment for an aviation company because it was United States or because it was China-Air based in Beijing doesn't seem to be tenable, and ICAO has made that clear. That's not the case if it goes to the climate negotiations where differences have been much more explicit about what should and shouldn't be done from different countries. One of the things that I am struck by is the other problem that China and India and others have sought to bring this differentiation into the ICAO conversation, which I think is pernicious, which means that if you're flying China-Air, you should what? Be something to different safety standards or noise standards because you're a developing country? I don't think that's a very good outcome. I don't think countries are interested in that outcome. So I think there's gonna be a debate. I think there's a little bit of movement both ways. I don't think the formal conversations gonna go as much to the convention. I do think under the convention there's gonna be this discussion about next steps, and this is kind of where Alden was, are there opportunities to find things that are not currently covered that might be covered? But you could still do that through an ICAO discussion, and I think that may be the way this moves. I am struck in this context by two things. The first is the question of whether or not the price that's currently there in the European trading system is likely to fundamentally drive reductions in the aviation sector. I don't believe they will. The pricing numbers that you've got currently are hovering right now at around 10 euros. The numbers that I have seen from places like the OECD suggest you need a price on the order of 100 euros in order to really fundamentally start to drive a change in behavior in that sector. So in that sense it may not go very far. On the other hand, there are a number of serious proposals that are being entertained by ICAO that look at things like direct flight programs, that look at modification of ground patterns, that look at changing in fuel opportunities, all of which could in fact have a much more direct impact on the sector. Now it doesn't either mean that this notion of economic parity is inappropriate or that the bank has a value in having a price whether implicit or explicit that's quite inclusive. And in that sense, there's a big debate underway and it should be underway around how you think about creating the signal that permeates all sectors in our economy. So I hope that's some of a bit more of an answer to where we're going. Jonathan, thank you once again for being so generous with your time and your knowledge and we certainly hope we'll have a chance to do this again. So thank you very much. Thank you for coming.


Tired of the everyday grind? Ever dream of a life of romantic adventure? Want to get away from it all? We offer you escape. Escape. Design to free you from the four walls of today for a half hour of high adventure.  While behind you, coming slowly through the night are the shuffling footsteps of a blind beggar who will lead you into a harrowing world of darkness and terror. Listen now as escape brings you Kathleen Heights terrifying story, The Return. The freighter menlaw crept slowly through the breakwater of the outer harbor. Most of the twelve passengers were on deck, looking north beyond the converging jetties to the modern city of Bezerta. But two of us, a man named Tuckett and myself, Bezerto was a destination. I didn't know what brought Tuckett here. I didn't really know what brought me here. I only knew that I'd looked for something all over the world without success. I'd looked everywhere except Bezerta. As sure I checked in at a small hotel and a short time later I was part of the early evening crowd on the streets. And there you go. Sure. Can you tell me how to get to the Arab town? Oh, sorry, I didn't notice about your eyes. One does not need eyes to perceive truth, Effendi. No, I suppose not. What's your name? Niga. The Arab town is north, due north of here. And the truth is everywhere for all to see if they will but see. I hope you're right. Well, bye, Niga. It is Mr. Easer, isn't it? Oh, Tuckett. I lost track of you when we came ashore. Thought I'd find you again at the hotel, but they tell me you're not registered. Where are you staying? Hotel North Africa. How about joining me there for dinner, if you don't have any plans? I don't think I have any plans. But if I do, they can catch up with me there, don't you think? Yes, I guess they can. My words hadn't meant much more to me than they did to Tuckett. I tried to explain during dinner. Maybe it was the wine that was talking, maybe me. Either way, Tuckett seemed interested enough to ask a question. Have you any idea what you're looking for, Reser? I'm looking for a place where there's no struggle. No struggle for you? For anyone. I'm 40 years old, Tuckett, and for a little over half my lifetime I've traveled the world. Worked my way, worked the sea and the earth.  I suppose that's right. But it seems to me we're making a lot of progress in some directions. Now, medicine, for example... Medicine's a good example. They licked pneumonia, they found cancer waiting for them. They inoculate for smallpox and they find bubonic plague. For every achievement there's a new struggle waiting, and I wonder if that's progress, Tuckett. Well, I don't know. I never thought of it this way. They'll take food, clothing and shelter, the basic needs. Some parts of the world people don't have them, but even when they do, there are bigger struggles to take their place. Fears, insecurities. Maybe you beat these things one at a time, but you've never got it made. While you're fighting against one struggle, another one's being fed and made strong, and it never ends until you die struggling to live. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny in a way. You come to Berserta hoping you'll find a place where there's no struggle, and I've come here, well, to get into the struggle, I guess. I'm opening an import-export business small, and I'm sure full of struggle, but I'm not cynical about it or disillusioned yet. No, I don't feel cynical, Tuckett. I'm just short on hope, because I don't see any end in sight. Research. What would you change if it were up to you? The struggle. Show me the place where there's no struggle. That's where I want to be. I wonder what it would be like. If you find it, let me know, will you? If I can, I will. I promised I'd get in touch with Tuckett in a few days, but as I went back to the streets of Berserta, walking through the fine rain that was falling now, I wondered if I'd ever see him again. My course took me north, along the canal, through the modern city, past the ancient citadel, to the entrance of the walled Arab town. I passed no one, and yet I knew I was not alone. Someone was following behind me. Soon I heard his footsteps at my side. We are almost there, Effendi. Nega, you're walking without your cane to lead you. I am come to lead you, Effendi. Where? Through the wall ahead. Your words have been heard, Effendi. You are ready? Ready for what? You have said, show me the place where there is no struggle. How do you know what I've said? You have asked enough questions of life, Effendi. Come. We go through the wall. Oh, you're out of your mind. Look about you, Effendi, on all sides, there are walls. You have come too far to go back. What are you talking about? I can't go back. You have said the words, show me the place. Through the wall ahead is the perfect place. I will lead you. Oh, this is crazy. You're crazy. You're blind. You can't lead me anywhere. Let go of me.  I said, let go of me.  I had swung at Nega with all the force in me, only to find myself flattened against the wall. Did I slip on the wet pavement or trip? I don't know. That was no imaginary wall I had hit. I felt the hard pain of it and the rain beating against my face. And then it was over. The room in which I awakened was large, large and empty with great windows at the far end, bright sunlight streaming through them. There was no room I'd ever seen before. My clothes were no longer damp and there was no pain in me. I moved toward the sunlight. You were a long time coming, Risa. I don't see you. Come out of the shadows toward the light. You will find me. Now you can see me, can you not? Yes, now I see you. You seem to know me. I've never seen you before. I am called Zin. You are most welcome, Risa. Yours has been a tortuous trip, I know. I understand that beggar, old fool. He said he was leading me to the perfect place. The important thing is that you are here, Risa. Come. Look through the windows. Oh, oh, this is beautiful. Mountains, valley, lakes, fields. Never seen anything like it. It's, it's, it is perfect.   You want it to be free of it. Am I, am I dead? Do you feel dead? No, no. No, I don't. I feel confused. There's so much I don't understand. I have questions. You will begin to see the answers for yourself once the processing has begun. Processing? There are things you must give up for perfection, Risa. In the processing these things will leave you. One of them is written in your expression now, doubt. You cannot doubt perfection and have it too. And after that you must give up fear and greed. Will you miss them, Risa? No, no, of course not. There are other things, of course. Whenever you have questions you will find me nearby to answer them. Do you have any more questions now? No. Then you are ready. Go on, my son. Go out and live in a perfect place. You hesitate. Why? I don't know. Surely there's nothing to fear from perfection. You would not think so, would you, my son? I went out the door, down the path, into the perfect place. The hesitation of fear grew less with each step. I turned a short distance away to wave back at zine, but the door I had walked through was gone. The building and the window. And there was no sign of zine, but somehow it seemed unimportant. I turned back to the path and walked ahead. Hello, my love. Hello. I am Angela. Angela. You are Risa and my love. I knew you would be here when I wanted you most. You were expecting me? You knew I would be here. I wanted you. Take my hand. We will walk together, won't we? I think we will, Angela. Oh, my love. Ours will be a lovely time together. Perfectly lovely. You are listening to The Return, tonight's presentation on Escape. Next Sunday evening, Lionel Barrymore will again be here on most of these same stations as your host on the Radio Hall of Fame. Remember to hear Lionel Barrymore next Sunday on CBS Radio. And now, Escape and the second act of The Return. Angela was all of beauty, all of woman. She was grace and strength and delicacy. And she was always at my side as we walked the broad valleys of the perfect place. She was my love. And it was a perfect love. The land was all beauty. The people were all smiles. Every need was satisfied. There was love and abundance. Peace and perfection was at every hand. And there was no struggle. No struggle about anything. After a time when I felt the need of a friend, a friend appeared. He was Lar, Angela's brother. Lar loved the sea and he had a fine schooner for fishing. Angela tells me you enjoy fishing, Reser. Name your fish and I promise you boatloads of it. Oh, that sounds wonderful. I have no preference. Any fighting game fish is fine sport. The day is perfect. The wind is perfect. Everything we need is a boy. It's all very easy, isn't it? It is as it should be. For fishing we need wind and sail and sea and fish. So we have them. Hard to believe. It's there to see and believe. Wind is failing. Then this must be the spot. The best waters. Best? We would not have stopped here if they were not the best. Nice arrangement. Well, where's the gear? The lines are out. They are just right. Go see for yourself. It's a strike, Lar. A strike here to stop at line. Pull him in, Reser. He's all yours. Oh, it's albacore. And a giant. He stopped fighting. There's no fight in him. Pull him in, Reser. He's a perfect albacore. Perfect. I never saw a fish giving so quickly. Practically jumped onto the deck. And it kept on that way. All day, every fish that found our lines fairly flopped into the schooner of its own volition. Lar had promised me a boatload of fish and we had him when Angela met us in port at evening. There had been no struggle. No effort even in lifting the great fish off the lines. It was phenomenal. And rather frightening. Some days later Angela suggested a deer hunt with Lar we walked through the beautiful countryside through fields toward the wooded hills. Look ahead, my love. Set your sights. Oh, yes. The first shot is yours, Reser. All right. You see, Lar? Directly ahead. Perfect deer. Yes, I see. Perfect deer. 30 or 40 of them all lined up as targets. Couldn't miss one if I tried. Fire, Reser. Oh, I can't. You wanted deer? Well, there they are. Angela, listen to me. Don't you see, we haven't hunted for deer. Now part of the thrill of hunting is the hunt itself and then the finding of your game and matching your wits against his. If you win, then you've won something. But you said you wanted deer. And when we fished, you said you wanted fish. Look, if I had said I wanted to hunt bears instead of deer, then all the bear I could shoot would be in the sights of my gun. Or if I'd said quail or duck, the sky overhead had been black with them. Is that true? Yes. Yes, my love. That is all true. Yes. Yes, perfect. Like all things. Oh, but that isn't perfect. Can't I make you see that?  Would you? I want to be alone a while. Of course, darling. That's perfectly all right with me. Perfectly. I turned then and I walked in no direction toward no place. Inside, I was all fury and confusion. And something more. I didn't know why, but I was reacting to the constant smiles of Angela and Lar with something like terror. And then I stopped and lay in a spot of cool green grass to rest and think and not think. What are your questions, Reese? Zine. I said I'd be nearby to answer when you needed me. It's hard to question. I just find perfection difficult to understand. Do you doubt it? The perfection? No. I've seen and known many perfect things here. You wanted assurance there was no struggle here in the perfect place. You have seen no struggle, have you, Reese? No, none. But now... Now, you must see everything. The fish, the deer, they have no fight in them. There's no sport, there's no challenge. You wanted no struggle. You cannot have both struggle and no struggle. You once berated existence as a thing men struggle through and died struggling to live. I know. I... Your processing will go on, Reese. Step by step, it will go on. There will be no struggle. And you will realize that you cannot improve on perfection. And when I turned to answer, Zine, he was gone again as I knew he would be. He was gone, but the terror was still with me. There was goodness and kindness. There was plenty. Why did I fear it? What was its terror? My thoughts went to Angela and soon we were together again as if nothing other than perfection had passed between us. She took me into a village I had not seen. The life there was simple, but perfect. Is it not beautiful here, my love? Is not everything and everyone beautiful? Angela, what do all the people of the village do? Do? How do they live? Do they work? Are there jobs to do? Everyone does what he wants. No. Who tells the fields and plants them? Who builds the homes? So many questions always, my love. And questions about the simplest of things. The fields. One goes there when one wants something and one finds it. The homes, they're just here. Nothing to be achieved because all things have been achieved. There is no work because all the work has been done. That sounds very well. Does it please you? Yes, I guess it does. Look, the men at the canvases across the way. They're painting. Is that doing something? Oh, let's have a look. Lovely paintings. Perfectly lovely, are they not? Oh, this one's quite a good landscape. And this one here. Do look at this one, reserve. You see? Perfectly lovely. They're just the same. They're identical. Every flower, the tree, the hill just the same in color and size. Angela. What is it, darling? Three men painting pictures and each picture is exactly like the others. There is just one perfect landscape of this sort. How could it be otherwise? There is only one way to be, to do, to paint. And that is perfect. And there's just one perfect book because there's just one perfect way to set words down? Of course, my love. The perfect way. Oh, no, no. I wish Lar were here. Tell me this, this is perfection. Is it conformity? Angela, you wished me here.  Just one question, Lar. Is perfection conformity? Must everyone think and do and act and write and paint in just one way? There is just one perfect way. Oh, Noseen didn't say I'd have to give up all the things that make me, me, or that I couldn't work toward goals of achievement or that I must give up challenge in order to live in the perfect place. You are so different, Riser. Angela, what if I should leave you? What if I were no longer your love? Would that be all right with you? If that is what you wish. Perfectly all right, darling. Perfectly. Oh, you're crazy. Oh, Tuckett ought to be here. Oh, he should see what I've seen.  Tuckett? Tuckett. Someone with a chance to work and dream and set goals for himself and make mistakes, honest mistakes and gamble to win or lose. He can take his chances. I think this Tuckett must be a very strange man. And I think this is something I've been wanting to do for a long time. What an odd gesture. I've never seen one man strike another before.  Let's make a good fight of it. Let's make a perfect fight.  You won't fight back? You won't fight back because there's no struggle here. You mentioned this word struggle often. Is it a good word? Struggle? Yeah. Yeah. I think it is. They were smiling when I left. The whole village was smiling broadly and they waved at me happily. I ran and I walked and I ran again. The mountains surrounding the Great Valley were tall and steep. I had to get through or around or over them somehow. I had to escape the perfect place. You have further questions, Lisa. Just one, Zane. How do I get out of here? Get out? You want to leave the perfect place? Yes, and I am leaving and you can't stop me. I would not try to stop you if you really want to go. I will show you the way. This is no trap? No. There is one thing. If you go, you can never return. That's fine with me. In fact, that's perfect. You'll be going back to the struggle. This perfection is filthy. It's vicious, insidious. You prefer the struggle, then? To this? Oh, yes. The struggle is... The struggle is wrong. It shouldn't have to be. But we'll work on it in every succeeding generation. At least there's work to be done and the incentive is there to do it. Oh, brother, wait till I tell people about this perfect place. Yes, Lisa. Tell them you found the perfect place. Tell them about the beauty, the perfection, about Angela and La and me. Tell them you were here and you saw it. But there's no struggle. Tell them you saw all this and ran. Will anyone believe you? My lips formed an answer, but no words came. And suddenly there was no zine and no perfect place. Only the rain beating on my face as I lay at the foot of a high wall. I felt the hard pain in my back. Then I remembered it all. The beggar, the bazaar, the walled Arab town beyond. Couldn't have happened very long before. Couldn't have lain there long. Now, remember that Tuckett was staying at the Hotel North Africa and I hurried there to him. Tuckett! Tuckett, open the door! Tuckett! Good heavens, what's all the racket about? Oh, I'm sorry. I was anxious to find you again. I got in a fight down in the native quarter, which was a mistake because I've been lying wet and cold in some back alley for an hour or so. Well, it's rease, sir, isn't it? What? Well, of course, man. Oh, look, don't you remember at dinner earlier this evening? Rease, sir, of course, of course, and I remember the dinner. I haven't seen you since, but after all, I should remember it was only a year ago. Under the direction of Norman McDonnell, Escape has brought you the return by Kathleen Hyte, starring Lawrence Dobkin. Featured in the cast were Edgar Berrier, Paul Dubov, Gene Bates, Howard Culver, and Lou Krugman, your announcer, George Walsh. The special music for Escape is composed and conducted by Leith Stevens. Next week. You are alone in a world of decay and desolation, looking down on what was once a great city, while coming slowly to meet you. A hand stretched out in greeting to you is a beautiful girl whose very existence may be the cause of your death. So listen next week when Escape brings you Jack London's classic novel, The Scarlet Plague. The little red schoolhouse of bygone days was something to be proud of, but in many parts of the country today, it has become the little shabby schoolhouse. To house its students, its equipment outdated and inadequate, its teachers too few and underpaid. If your schools are like that, act with others in your community before the cost of repair and replacement gets astronomical. Act now in the interest of Tomorrow's America. You hear America's favorite shows on the CBS Radio Network.