{"id":2471,"date":"2015-12-07T08:00:42","date_gmt":"2015-12-07T07:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/?p=2471"},"modified":"2015-12-12T20:07:30","modified_gmt":"2015-12-12T19:07:30","slug":"paris-2015-an-agreement-in-sight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/2015\/12\/07\/paris-2015-an-agreement-in-sight\/","title":{"rendered":"Paris 2015: An agreement in sight"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-2475 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/files\/2015\/12\/imgres-1.jpg\" alt=\"imgres-1\" width=\"290\" height=\"174\" \/>Although I am not a lawyer or a diplomat, I must admit that <strong>reading the <a href=\"http:\/\/unfccc.int\/files\/bodies\/awg\/application\/pdf\/draft_paris_agreement_5dec15.pdf\">draft of the Paris agreemen<\/a>t that was released on Saturday has made me optimistic that an agreement is in sight<\/strong>. The text, widely sighted in the <a href=\"http:\/\/unfccc.int\/files\/bodies\/awg\/application\/pdf\/draft_paris_agreement_5dec15.pdf\">press<\/a>\u00a0and other <a href=\"http:\/\/paristext2015.com\/\">analysts<\/a> still has a number of open issues to resolve over the next week of negotiations.\u00a0\u00a0The good news is that it is only 20 pages long and my guess is these issues will be ironed out or diplomatic language found to\u00a0get around them.<strong><br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<h2><strong>The $100 Billion Question<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>At its heart, it seems to me, the agreement puts forward nothing less than a new vision of the world. This is a world fundamentally at peace where the nations of the planet agree on a clear and present danger and on the overall lines of what to do about it.<\/p>\n<p>In this world, there will be an enormous transfer of money, perhaps as much as $100 billion per year, from the richest countries to the poorest. As I read it, this commitment is at the core of the agreement and is aimed to ensure that\u00a0economic development can be compatible with limiting the effects of climate change.<\/p>\n<p>There is, however, a clause in the deal which says that implementation in poor countries is contingent on the financing.\u00a0The money is supposed to start flowing in 2020 and for me how these funds will be found, managed, and used will become one of the\u00a0key political issues of the next decade. While part of it will pay for alternative sources of energy, they\u00a0will also fund\u00a0the REDD+ program which essentially creates a mechanism for the developed world to pay countries for NOT harvesting their forests.<\/p>\n<iframe class='xavier' width='100%' height='400' frameborder='0' allow='fullscreen' allowfullscreen src='https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/D0WeGw3h2yU'><\/iframe>\n<h2><strong>New Institutions<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Managing the agreement will require the creation of a number of new institutions which are also spelled out to some degree in the draft. These include a\u00a0permanent secretariat of the convention itself, a number of political and technical groups, and an International Tribunal of Climate Justice.<\/p>\n<p>These institutions and the regulations and policy guidelines they will develop, fall into a pattern of environmental awareness and legislation that goes back to the first Clean Air Acts passed in the UK and the United States back in the 1950s. \u00a0Every time there is new popular concern about an environmental issue, that concern eventually gets turned into legislation and a\u00a0government agency is eventually set up to deal with it. The Environmental protection Agency in the United States, for example, was established in 1972.<\/p>\n<p>What is remarkable about this agreement, is that it will establish transnational\u00a0entities which could, over time, evolve into a kind of world government.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>In Denial<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/files\/2015\/12\/images-1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-2476\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/files\/2015\/12\/images-1-300x168.jpg\" alt=\"images-1\" width=\"300\" height=\"168\" \/><\/a>While the largest gathering of world leaders in world history is going on in Paris, what is most remarkable to me is that there are still otherwise intelligent people who question the whole idea of climate change and the science behind it. To make matters even more alarming, it appears that most of the candidates for the nomination of the\u00a0Republican Party in the United States share the view that the whole thing is simply overblown or some kind of bluff.<\/p>\n<p>I do believe that there are a number of reasonable policy options concerning what to do about the higher levels of carbon in the atmosphere and have written about a number of them over the last months. That being said, the idea that intelligent people believe the whole thing is simply made up or wrong\u00a0is hard for me to believe.<\/p>\n<p>It has taken the world more than 20 years to get its collective head around the issue of climate change and it appears that we can still prevent its most alarming impacts as long as reasonable men and women are in positions of power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Although I am not a lawyer or a diplomat, I must admit that reading the draft of the Paris accord that was released on Saturday has made me optimistic that an agreement is in sight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":788,"featured_media":2483,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419,82402],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate-change","category-environmental-regulations","megacategoria-mc-sustainability"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/788"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2471"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2485,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2471\/revisions\/2485"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}