Forbes on the "Inside The Paris Agreement" Event with Sue Biniaz

Inside The Paris Agreement: How The World Agreed To 'Balance' Greenhouse Gas Emissions

One surprise in the final draft of the Paris Agreement was a pledge by nearly all the world’s countries “to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century.”

It was a wordier phrase than had appeared in previous drafts and proposals, and one likely to prove more effective.

“Achieving a balance between sources and sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century will require net carbon dioxide emissions to be reduced, in effect, to zero,” Oxford University geosystems scientist Myles Allen said soon after the agreement passed. “It seems governments understand this, even if they couldn’t quite bring themselves to say so.”

Governments settled on the phrase after weighing many terms they couldn’t quite bring themselves to say, according to Susan Biniaz, a U.S. State Department attorney who has worked on climate negotiations since 1992, including the Paris climate talks in December.

“One of the lessons there was, sometimes you can reach agreement by getting rid of terms and just explaining what you mean,” Biniaz said last week in an appearance at the University of Chicago Law School.

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