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When the US Supreme Court decides a case it does it in the same way the British parliament makes a law and a local council approves a budget: with a majority vote.
Yet in 10 weeks’ time, when officials from nearly 200 countries gather to tackle the deepening dilemma of climate change, their decisions will be made in a far more cumbersome and onerous way — by consensus.
The COP28 conference in Dubai will in this sense be the same as every annual COP, or Conference of the Parties to the founding 1992 UN climate convention, since the first one in 1995. Yet again, a tiny minority of countries will be able to veto or drag out decisions on one of the most dire problems of our age.
This is not the only reason that nearly 30 years of COPs have failed to stop carbon emissions spiralling ever upwards. If upending a global energy system based on fossil fuels were easy it would have happened by now. But consensus decisions have slowed progress and they are an increasingly embarrassing reflection of a dysfunctional global climate process in need of reform.
Remember for instance the closing minutes of the COP26 conference in Glasgow in 2021, when India and a handful of other nations watered down an agreement to phase out coal. The meeting decided instead that even this dirtiest fossil fuel should be phased “down” instead of out.
At a 2018 COP in Poland, another smattering of countries weakened moves to welcome a landmark UN science report on the consequences of 1.5C of warming — even though an earlier COP had commissioned the study.
The 2009 COP in Denmark ended in disarray after fewer than 10 countries baulked at formally adopting the Copenhagen Accord, or final conference agreement.
But the most serious victims of consensus have probably been efforts to cut aviation and shipping emissions. “That has absolutely been vetoed by a very small group of OPEC countries from the very beginning,” says Joanna Depledge, a global climate negotiations expert at the University of Cambridge. “I think if we had had majority voting it would have achieved something on that issue.” The job was instead left to UN shipping and aviation bodies that have struggled to devise meaningful measures.
Opec countries, notably Saudi Arabia, have often tried to block or delay progress at COPs. They also helped to lumber the meetings with consensus decisions in the first place.
When COPs began, a draft rule was drawn up that would have allowed majority voting. But a group of countries, led by Opec, objected and since then no COP has ever agreed on the basic rules of procedure that are central to any serious meeting.
Instead, each conference operates on draft rules of procedure which in practice has meant decisions are taken by consensus.
At the start of each gathering, a perfunctory effort is made to hold informal consultations to resolve the impasse. More serious efforts have occasionally been made as well. But Depledge, like other experts, thinks reform is unlikely because a consensus would be needed to switch to majority voting. Talk about Catch-22.
The former US vice-president, Al Gore, is the latest well-known campaigner to call for a rethink. “It’s rather absurd that the world has to go and beg Saudi Arabia for permission, please, to talk about solutions to the climate crisis,” he told the FT last week.
But Riyadh is not the only enemy of COP progress. OECD countries don’t like the idea of majority voting on issues such as financing climate action in poorer nations, when they would almost certainly be outvoted.
There are, of course, some advantages to a consensus. Decisions taken this way have more legitimacy. But they are also likely to be weaker and less onerous.
This matters at a time when climate COPs are no longer in the business of forging a big global accord such as the 2015 Paris Agreement. The name of the game now is implementing the measures needed to meet that agreement’s goal to prevent more dangerous levels of warming.
There is a growing push to focus on speeding up emissions cuts in key sectors by forging deals to end, say, forest loss or the sale of petrol cars in big markets.
Majority voting would clearly make it easier and faster to seal such agreements. In a year that is on track to be the hottest on record, would it be too much to ask COP28’s delegates to start fixing a voting system that should never have been broken in the first place?
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