Administration officials are ready to move from the high-minded ideals of last year’s international climate agreement in Paris to the pragmatic business of implementing the deal next week.
The 22nd Conference of the Parties meeting in Marrakesh, Morocco, which begins next week, is the first meeting of the 196 United Nations countries that agreed to the climate change agreement since the deal was reached in December.
Now that agreement is set to enter into force on Friday, which means the hard work to reduce carbon emissions is just beginning, said John Morton, director for energy and climate change for the National Security Council.
“COP 22 is really a COP of implementation and action,” he said. “The Paris Agreement was a turning point in terms of setting in place an international framework for action, and in the COP that is coming we intend to really intensify our work turning toward implementation.”
The Paris Agreement, which is nonbinding, aims to hold global temperature increase below 2 degrees Celsius, and each country that signed onto the agreement came up with its own pledge to reduce carbon emissions. In the United States, that means a 26-28 percent reduction in carbon emissions below 2005 levels by 2030.
The deal is set to go into effect Friday, a month after it met the necessary threshold of 55 countries accounting for 55 percent of world carbon emissions approving it domestically. Many scientists blame greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels for driving man-made climate change.
Some see many faults with the deal. For environmentalists, the pledges don’t do enough to stop the rise in global temperatures and lacks any punishment mechanism if countries don’t live up to their promises. Republicans and fossil fuel groups say the deal will hurt the global economy, especially in the United States.
Despite those criticisms, Obama administration officials believe they have momentum.
Administration officials are enthused by an agreement last month to cut down on hydrofluorocarbon emissions, which are refrigerants and are greenhouse gases more potent than carbon dioxide, and an agreement to begin cutting international aviation greenhouse gas emissions. Now, in Morocco, Jonathan Pershing, the U.S. special envoy for climate change, sees the meeting as a chance to get into the technical side of things.
“This is increasingly getting into an implementation agenda,” he said. “The Moroccans themselves are calling this an agenda of action.”
The United States’ agenda for the meeting is threefold, according to Morton and Pershing.
The American negotiators want to emphasize the country’s commitment to fighting climate change and being a part of the agreement. That comes in the face of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump promising to pull out of the Paris Agreement if he’s elected, which has caused some uneasiness in the environmental and international communities.
The officials also want to start hammering out the rules and guidelines of the agreement. Finally, they’re looking to press other countries on implementing their own plans to keep the deal on track.
“We’re on a very rapid timetable,” Pershing said. “We thought we’d have until 2020 to finish out these negotiations (on implementation), so now we’re going to make 2018 (the new goal).”
