The high-level talks kicked off on Monday, with the negotiators getting down to the business of tackling the many contentious issues that remain. French Foreign Minister Laurant Fabius created the “Paris Committee,” which meets each evening to report on progress. As I mentioned yesterday, four consultative processes were set up to come up with some agreement in four areas:
- Support, covering finance, technology, and capacity building;
- Differentiation, covering finance, mitigation, and transparency;
- Ambition, covering review of the pledges (every five years looks likely) and a long-term goal (e.g., 2 degrees, 1.5 degrees, decarbonization sometime within this century, etc.); and
- Pre-2020 ambition, covering pledges under Kyoto II.
In addition, four other consultative groups were created. They are:
- Adapatation, including loss & damages;
- Co-operative mechanisms;
- Forests, covering deforestation and their use as carbon sinks; and
- Response measures, covering things like the potential impacts on trade and competitiveness of climate policies.
As if these aren’t enough, there also are groups looking into the legality of the agreement. (Who says nothing gets done in these meetings?)
Many believe the next two days will be critical if the Parties are to get an agreement ready for the lawyers. Don’t count on it, though. The French have reserved the Le Bourget conference center through Sunday, and if experience is any guide, they’ll use up all the time allotted to them—and then some. Most folks here don’t expect an agreement before Sunday.
U.S. Business Unites to Protect Intellectual Property Rights
Intellectual property rights are once again in the dock at these talks, with India and other developing countries pushing to remove the barriers to technology transfer that IPRs are supposed to raise—a notion that’s been debunked many times.
Here’s a sample of what’s in the draft agreement text:
“In accordance with Article 4, paragraph 5, of the Convention, developed country Parties shall provide financial resources to address barriers created by policies and intellectual property rights (IPRs) and facilitate access to and the deployment of technology, including, interalia, by utilizing the Financial Mechanism and/or establishing a funding window under the GCF to meet the full costs of IPRs of environmentally sound technologies, knowhow and such technologies will be provided to developing country Parties free of cost in order to enhance their actions to address the adverse effects of climate change.”
In response, the Chamber and nine other U.S. business organizations have sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, and U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman urging them to hold the line and resist any attempts to inject IPR into the agreement.
In past climate change confabs, the United States government and other developed country governments have responded positively to business concerns, and we’ll continue to keep the pressure on. We’ve said all along than the climate changes talks are not the right venue for a discussion of IPRs. Indeed, any mention of IPRs in the climate change agreement would undermine the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights. We’ll also be on the lookout for “Trojan horse” proposals that seem innocuous but could be an invitation to IPR mischief-making.