Thread by @althecat

Video thread of a standup yesterday afternoon in the Cairo Press Conference Room with Eamon Ryan, the European Union's lead negotiator in 'loss and damage. 1/5

Loss & Damages has emerged as the most contentious of five areas in the negotiations in which the parties are yet to finalise agreed texts.
[Quoted thread ... Earlier thread covering part of the stocktaking session discussion of #LossAndDamage last night.

https://twitter.com/althecat/status/1593373862581895171?s=20&t=WTuBfqW7x1JIgPhIJRySkg

]

Minister Ryan's Standup was held immediately prior to an EU Press Conference in the afternoon, 6 hours before the stocktaking session. 2/5

In the segment above Ryan talks about possible funding mechanisms, to supercharge the fund including taxes on fossil fuel companies forecast to earn 3.9 Trillion in profits, as well as a levy for LossAndDamage of 1 Euro for each of 4.5 billion air tickets sold each year.

A similar levy on every container would help bring up the scale of finance he says.
"We are very unhappy that this perspective is not the center of the discussion around loss and damage, its been turned around to a kind of yes no to a fund, which brings us back to a 1992 view."

His ref. to "other countries" needing to be brought in maybe directed at Saudi Arabia which in 1992 was designated a "developing country", a situation which arose (I was told) because it wasn't considered one of the WWII allies, coming into existence and growing rich later.

1992 was of course a year after the first GHWB (Bush Senior's) war to liberate Kuwait.

"We hope we can get an outcome this afternoon that we can all rally around. But it can't be what we have now." 4/5

This is the final segment. The US and @JohnKerry has been notably absent from all of these loss and damages discussions as far as I can see.

After this there were a few questions. Including one from me. [But unfortunately my camera storage ran out].

@JohnKerry Hopefully @France24 English will post the full audio or video of this - as it was an interesting insight into the level of anxiety in the talks in the early afternoon.

After @TimmermansEU held a press conference in which I also asked a question which I will post if I can get it.

The question was a little more general. Related to the non-paper which was issued first thing in the morning.

I thought it was rather good, and definitely an attempt to get the parties talking together. With lots of big numbers and language about funding and finance.

But for at least some of the negotiators and observers that wasn’t the perspective.

This ^^ is David Tong from priceofoil.org an NGO which traces its history back to the execution of African environmental activist Ken Saro-Wira and 8 others - the Ogoni-9 in Nigeria in 1995 at the behest of Shell Oil, who later paid our $15 Million to their families.

Jumping back to the afternoon we get a taste for how quickly these COP negotiations can move as deadline approaches. From @TimmermansEU’s offer of a compromise accepting the creation of the “fund” late evening it is clear that Eamon Ryan’s efforts to get the G77 to move failed.

During the standup I asked Ryan why negotiations with the G77 had been so difficult?

His answer was that they would not engage at all.

China has backed the fund proposal and offered to contribute $$, even though as a developing nation (like Saudi) they are not obligated to.

But the problem as we come into the final scheduled day today is that there are still five un-accepted draft decisions on the table, and two of them - #ClimateFinance and #LossAndDamages are extremely politically contentious.

The EC may compromise further on both but the absence of any significant running in all of this from the US and China is telling.

At #cop26 @JohnKerry pulled a China-US Partnership out of a hat then did some very swift negotiating on the floor on the final day (a Saturday) to get consensus after the removal of a Scottish created Loss and Damages facility was and an Indian text change on coal.

This year there is a lot more still unresolved however, and the US-China cooperation agreement was somewhat sullied by the reckless visit of @SpeakerPelosi Pelosi to Taiwan. And he is also nowhere to be seen.

It’s worth qualifying this by noting that #cop27 has been a bit like being in an information maze, so I may have just missed all the significant US achievements in this COP.

Hopefully he has been doing some of the quiet clever diplomacy he is famous for.

Apparently the method that works for journalists seeking to get answers from him is to chase him with a phone camera as he walks very fast to and from meetings.

In the meantime the almost universal view is that this COP will at least run till Sunday - 2 days over scheduled time - and may have to be held over for a finishing mercifully smaller part B #Cop27 meeting in Bonn Germany in the summer.

And now a new #cop27 day is beginning.

As today is the last scheduled day of #COP27, it will begin to shutdown today and most of the attendees will depart or engage in some post-cop sightseeing.

Left behind will be the hard core journalists, the delegates and the presidency. Not much will happen outside of stocktaking updates, ngo briefings and negotiations until it’s time to reconvene the adjourned COP & CMA meetings and see if consensus can be reached.

Depending how far the parties are on Saturday night, the Presidency may just decide to call it a day and adjourn the meeting till the summer. But such a decision would have political repercussions and undermine global public confidence / and therefore will not be taken lightly.

We shall see….

This article tells the story of the last time a COP actually failed - and it wasn’t Copenhagen 2009 (even though almost everyone says that was awful). The precedent is from 2000 in The Hague, Netherlands. enb.iisd.org/events/unfccc-…

/ends

@threadreaderapp