 It's my great pleasure to introduce our speaker for today, Arthur Lee, who's an old friend and not too old, a seasoned veteran of the international climate negotiations. And so Arthur is a Chevron Fellow and Senior Strategy Advisor in the Corporate Strategy and Sustainability Group at Chevron. But more relevant to this talk, he is one of the few industry people in my experience who actually goes to almost all the climate negotiation meetings and, in addition, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I actually tried doing both for about five years and I was totally worn out and he's been doing the same since 1998, which is great. So he is a respected industry spokesman in that group and there are probably only six or eight of you guys from less than that. Remaining in that realm. So he's well equipped to talk to us today about what the heck happened at Charme Alchique in COP 27 and how the process got to that point and a little bit about where he thinks things will go in the next couple of cops. I guess we just confirmed that this year's, what's it, November? In November 30th to December 12th. Is in Dubai. So Arthur, take it away and give us an overview of all the work you've done. People think these are kind of great places to go and you get to vacation and then shop around in Sitesi. But my experience is once you go there, actually a friend of mine described the negotiating sessions as 90% boredom and about 2% of totally incredible, outrageous, or shattering things, either good or bad. So with that introduction, take it away, Arthur. Thank you so much, John, for that intro. I know that I've been living my life by cop numbers and I know that sounds very pathetic. I've lived my life since COP 5 in 1999, my very first cop. And it was indeed a life-altering event for me. If you read my bio, you know I'm a chemical engineer. I came from MIT and then Caltech for my masters. And I thought I'd just work in industry as a chemical process engineer designing chemical processes, refineries and as well as even power plant and also molten carbon, a few cells and things like that that was early in my repertoire in my wheelhouse, straight ahead chemical engineer. But then through my career there's been some twists and turns. And then when I ended up at Texaco, which later became Chevron, Texaco and now Chevron, and it's been almost 30 years now. By this April I would have worked 30 years at Chevron or from Texaco onward. And I'm a chemical engineer as I said. I still think of myself as one, even though I haven't practiced chemical engineering in probably over 25 years. But when I walked into Hotel Maritime in Bonn, COP 5 in 1999, and where I left I was a totally changed person. It really is a life altering kind of experience. Because, you know, being a chemical engineer and then seeing how the United Nations actually works was really, wow, anybody, I can't use any more superlatives. But it's just changed my whole outlook on world events and on how some things actually work in real life. So anyway, without too much more, let me just say something about the COP. And we'll set you all on the same page and it will be on this slide. They'll just more or less stay on this slide. It really is a UN convention. It's called the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. So I'll use those words first, UNFCCC. Okay, so just remember that. And then the COP is actually a conference of parties, parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. So a conference of parties, when you hear the word conference, it actually is not the same as going to a chemistry conference or chemical engineering or electrical engineering conference. You're not there to do business in the traditional sense. You're there to actually negotiate. Nations actually go there as negotiators. They're not there to fool around. They're there to actually negotiate. And so the UN Framework Convention was agreed to in Rio de Janeiro back in 1992 before my time. I started, like I said, in 1999. So it was before my time. I could see how it was when they went through the UNFCCC became ratified in 1994, when I think 55 countries exceeded or ratified the Framework Convention. And the United States was actually one of the countries that first ratified it. So it is actually law of the land for the United States. When you accede to or you ratify something, in the U.S. cases by the Senate, you actually make a commitment to the international community that you will pass laws and regulation, whatever your system of governance is, to actually implement the UN Framework Convention. And so that's what actually the U.S. EPA did. And in some way, the U.S. Energy Information Administration actually did from 1994 onwards. And other countries have done the same. But the UNFCCC was a voluntary instrument. So three years later, in COP 3, well, COP 1 was 1995. Let me just set the record straight. COP 1 was Berlin. And so like any new process, new meeting, they tried to come up with a set of procedures and how to make decisions. So let me hold off on that. But the decision-making process itself was a huge debate in Berlin and was never really finalized. You might find that incredible that this whole UN thing, we're actually operating under draft rules of procedures since 1995. There's nothing final in any of the procedures at the UNFCCC. Everything is draft rules. But people agreed to do it. And so the whole decision-making process is done in a somewhat ad hoc way. I wouldn't say it's completely ad hoc, but it's somewhat in a way that at least countries recognize that they're doing things under draft rules of procedures. And the chairman, who was usually the facilitator or the presidency of the COP, would actually hold up a gavel and actually gavel a decision and say, yes, that's been agreed, and that's it. So that is the process. When it comes down to it, it is up to the president or the chairman of the COP to gavel a decision and say, yes, that's it, no more discussion. And then it would be decided. That is the ultimate decision-making. But of course, everything is done by consensus before that. So let me give you a sense of COP, the evolution of COP. COP 5, as I said, when I went into the maritime, it changed my life. It was less than 10,000 people. And it was just enough attendees and negotiators and observers like me to fill out the rooms and the plenaries and all that at the hotel maritime. Now, you might wonder, wow, this hotel must be pretty huge. In fact, it was actually one of the largest hotels, and it's the largest hotel in Bonn that can hold these plenaries. It's actually designed almost for the United Nations. So there are these plenary rooms that could remind you of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. It is quite large. And also three German ministry buildings. I think John Smith is some of those. Three German ministry buildings that were also borrowed from the German government to be part of the negotiation process as well. So that was it, about 10,000 or maybe even less than 10,000 people. But at COP 27, the one I'm going to focus on today, I stopped counting at 35,000. So it's quite different, and the scale of the events are very different. So let me go on then. The presidency, this is important to understand, when a country decides to volunteer, really to volunteer to be the host country, so that country then automatically accepts the responsibility of also becoming the presidency. So in this case, of course, it was the foreign minister, His Excellency, Mr. Sameh Shukri, the foreign minister of Egypt. So when he became the president, what that means is literally, yes, they would announce a city, a host city to host the COP, but it is also his role, his role here, he has a very strong role here, to do one thing, and that's one thing only, is to facilitate all of the mediation, bilateral and smaller multilateral discussion, especially in the second week of the COP. The COP is a two-week process, and the first week is always the technical negotiators. People kind of more or less like me, a technical person, going there to negotiate. And these, of course, these people represent their governments. I'm just an observer. So all these negotiators from the government, they negotiate, but then the second week, that's when things get really interesting, and that's when the political level people, the ministers, and the assistants, and all of those people, then they wrap up all the technical issues that have been negotiated the first week. If they get any agreements at all, and if they don't, there'll be options and menu of options in those particular issues. And then the political level folks, then they're the ones who make decisions and further massage the package, if you will, and see if they can come to a political agreement of all the decisions that were either made or not quite made, and then they would further make an agreement on that. So his role as the president, he would fan out all his diplomats, the Egyptian diplomats. Their role is simply to mediate and make sure the negotiations are successful. So when you hear, like Dubai this year, when you hear something about the presidency of Dubai being perhaps biased and all that, well, maybe there is some of that, but you have to understand the role of the presidency. It's really very purely and simply to make sure the negotiations are successful. Why? Because to have a failure as a host government would actually be quite highly embarrassing for that country. So Egypt, whatever you might have thought of Egypt as a government and whatever it is, human rights and all that, Egypt had to look good and had to make sure the negotiations were successful. And so will the UAE. They will have to make sure the negotiations are successful, will be successful. So I just want people to understand that. The chairing role, the presidency role, is actually quite pivotal. It's not necessarily something to influence issues, but the way they want to influence issues is to influence a successful outcome. Otherwise, it doesn't look good. And I can, you know, offline, I can even tell you stories at COP, for example, at COP 15 in, that was 2009, first year President Obama's term presidency. Copenhagen, the Danish government volunteered to be the presidency and that was a spectacular failure, unfortunately. And it didn't look good for the Danish government for years after. So it's quite unfortunate, but it does not look good, it did not look good for the Danish government when that whole thing cratered. So let me set you on the same page as that. Now, there's something here too. Mr. Shukri, when he talked about the COP in the very first day of the two weeks, he called it the implementation COP. That COP 27 is time to really stop talking, you know, high-level stuff, but talk more about details of implementation. And that's what the COP turned out to be, lots of details and the hashtag that was given by the organizers and by the presidency was together for implementation. So at the end of it, after two weeks and overtime negotiation, he then called this agreement, set of agreement of decisions, he called it the Charm-El-Shake implementation plan. Now, this is a bit of a new tradition that I'll explain a little bit here. Last year at COP 26, the UK government was the presidency and Mr. Alok Sharma, his Excellency then, he had the role of minister and he was given the task from the UK government to be the president. And so after that was all agreed to and there was a whole set of decisions, the UK government very smartly gave it a name and the name they gave it was the Glasgow Climate Pack. So I said that with some gravitas, Glasgow Climate Pack sounds really important Now I'll tell you, it's no more important and certainly not as important as the Paris Agreement or the Kyoto Protocol or the original UN Framework Convention. Just because some government gave it a name doesn't mean that it was that important. So I want you to, when you read the news media in the future, to really understand what sometimes these words and names actually mean or don't mean. And so anyway, the UK government is very smart in their portrayal of their success and called it the Glasgow Climate Pack. Sounds really great. Now actually the Egyptians who are a little bit more down the earth, they just simply called it the Charmel Sheikh Implementation Plan which is what it is. There's a lot of implementation details. Just want to know the Brits are really good in naming things. And to tell you why the difference was the Paris Agreement is a legal instrument. The Kyoto Protocol that came a few years after the UN Framework Convention was also a legal instrument and of course the UNFCCC is also a legal instrument. So those three are the legal instruments that I'm talking about today and the UNFCCC is really the legal instrument under which all of these negotiations is the Mother Treaty. The Mother Treaty of everything. And then you have the Kyoto Protocol that came in 1997 and then 18 years later in 2015 we got the Paris Agreement. In between we had all these decisions but they're nowhere as high level or as important as these legal agreements, okay? All right, so there's a little bit of drama. I just want to explain these photos. Most of these photos I took, okay? So there's no copyright issues if you want to use them. I grant you that copyright. You could use them, just attribute it back to me. And I think these slides will be shared with you. So the only one I didn't take is of course this one. This one came from the UN. It's based on the webcast. It's a SNIP of the webcast. But I think almost every other photo in here I've taken. So it was a long process, long negotiations. It lasted almost 70 hours beyond the deadline which would have been Friday night but it just went right through that. It blasted right through that and just had all days negotiations and all night. Okay, when you think about as engineers, some of you, I know I did some all-nighters myself at MIT in Caltech. So you know all-nighters, what that means? Well, these people did all-nighters. Okay, these people did all-nighters for almost three straight days a night. Now, I don't know how they slept or whether they took turns going to bed or something, but I'm sure some of them did. And I'm sure some of them didn't. So it was three straight days of round-the-clock negotiation. And finally, at 3 a.m., Mr. Shukri decided, okay, it's time to close the meeting. So he started gaveling all the decisions that happened made up to that time and going through the ones that are made and the ones that are not quite made yet, he would do that a little bit later in the morning. And finally, at 6 a.m., it was done. Okay, so from 3 a.m. to 6 a.m., they just went through one by one and there were probably more than 50 issues that they had to gavel, that he had to gavel down. And he called it the implementation cop. Now, this is what one issue looks like in terms of negotiation, and this is actually one of the smaller rooms. It's not one of the bigger rooms. This is one of the smaller rooms. And in this room, probably there were 25 countries, maybe, or a little bit more. Now, some countries, some representatives in this room will actually block negotiators, okay? And let me explain the process of that. Okay, I mean, imagine you are from Vanuatu. You're just one of maybe two delegates from Vanuatu. And how would you be able to negotiate 50 issues, 50 decisions? What do you think? Anyone? How would you negotiate 50 issues when there are only two of you? I think I gave you the answer already. You negotiate as a block. You go to a block, in this case, well, in the case of Vanuatu, they probably go to two blocks. One is called the G77 plus China. It's a big negotiating block. A group of 77 countries plus China. And or maybe you also go to the small island developing state, IDS, the SIDS. So that's another block. So you could go to either one or maybe both. And you kind of delegate your issues to these block negotiators and let them negotiate whatever it is for you in those 50 issues. And you only focus on the ones that you really care about and you go to those directly. So a lot of times, these smaller countries, that's what they do. So they go through blocks. So I just want you to understand that process as well. That's how smaller countries delegate their part of their sovereignty in a sense to other countries. And that's how they leverage power. So some of the themes that will come through in my presentation is all about power. It's all about power of negotiations and influence on the world stage. The other thing I didn't quite explain, but I'll explain now, is in this UN process. Now, you've always heard of UN General Assembly and all that, right? And certainly I grew up in New York City. So every time there's a big meeting, you can see traffic go crazy in New York. So the UN General Assembly and also the UN, when it comes to war and peace process, you have sort of an executive council. And that's called the UN Security Council. You have five permanent powers, permanent nuclear powers, and one rotating state from the General Assembly. And so the five nuclear weapons states are basically your executive committee for the world when it comes to war and peace, right? I mean, you still have to vote on certain things. But the UN process is like that at that level for those kind of issues, for war and peace. But in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, it's very different. It's entirely different. Every country has a voice. Every single country has a voice, okay? I want to let that sink into you in your thinking, okay? You may not have known this, or maybe you were aware of this, but couldn't quite believe it. But every single country has a voice. Now, it doesn't mean that every country has a vote, okay? So there is no voting mechanism in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. No voting. When that was first proposed back in Berlin, maybe John even knows this and can tell me the process. In Berlin, when they try to propose something like that, a voting procedure for making decisions, guess which country voted against that? Guess which country spoke up against that? Anyone? U.S. U.S., okay? Okay, who else? Anyone else? Okay, I won't take too long. European Union, United States, all the big countries, of course vehemently oppose that, right? Why would they give up their right to be a big, powerful country, to a little country that also would have a vote? G77 plus China will overwhelm any issue, okay, in a decision-making process like that. Okay, so the U.S., EU, all the big countries definitely oppose such a voting mechanism. And when that was proposed, that basically created a whole decision-making process, governance process in the first COP. And from then on, 20-plus years later, we're still operating under these draft rules of procedures. We're still under that. And the reason why, you would ask, why would they still be draft? Everyone is still operating under them. But of course, that means, okay, if they're draft, and anytime anyone doesn't really like it, if it doesn't happen, they can always say, well, that's just a draft, that's just a draft rule. So anyone can actually renege on following those rules, which is why you need a strong presidency to gavel the decision and say, okay, that's been made. So we're operating in this UN framework convention, which I didn't know until a few years into the COP myself. I really didn't understand this. But a few years into the COP, I finally realized, the power structure, the power influence. And again, I'm a chemical engineer. I know political science. But this was amazing to me, okay, how all this works. So anyway, so as an engineer, a scientist, I found this fascinating, just observing all this. It's been life altering. Okay, so I'll just give you five key takeaways from the Charm El Sheikh implementation plan from what was agreed to COP 27. And with these five, I can tell you a little story with each, because I hope you will find it interesting and it will illustrate some of the realities of what actually happens at these negotiations. Number one, the Paris Agreement goals, although the Paris Agreement goals are clearly restated and reinforced at this COP, but there is some statement. There is some emphasis shifting more towards the goal of one and a half degrees. Now, of course, the Paris Agreement, if you recall, is all about well below two degrees. And with actions, steps taken towards no more than one and a half degrees. So that's the, well, I didn't quote it verbatim, but that's essentially the decision made at the Paris Agreement at COP 21. So again, note down that number at COP 21. That's the Paris Agreement. Okay, so at COP 27 now, there's that restatement of purpose, a restatement of a goal. But there definitely is now more of an emphasis towards one and a half degrees, because the scientific community really thinks that even getting to one and a half degrees, there would still be a lot of impact, a significant adverse impact on us, on human beings. Okay, so one and a half degrees, definitely there's that switch on emphasis. But one of the parties, and I'm not making any of this up, you can watch the plenary at the end of the final hours and here in California, whatever it was, and then 3 a.m. in the morning over there. You can hear Switzerland, the Swiss representative, talking on behalf of Hisbock. Hisbock was called the Environmental Integrity Group, which consists of about five or six countries. So the Swiss representative spoke up and said, well, you know, I just found, he said something really, not too outrageous, but he said he was very disappointed that some countries, some parties, which shall remain unnamed, and that's what he said, and he didn't name them, tried to roll back what was already agreed to at Glasgow, and he said six, okay. So I'll connect the dots for you, and I'm not saying necessarily that's what happened, because I wasn't there, I wasn't there in the closed rooms when they were negotiating this. But in COP26, there were two of the most controversial statements were made, was about phasing out of coal, okay, and phasing out of fossil fuels subsidies. Now, just to be fully transparent, you know, of course, I come from Chevron, I work for an oil and gas company. So those two were the first proposed as words in the decision that COP26 phased out, okay, phased out of coal and phased out of fossil fuels subsidies. But what happened was they were at the very end, at COP26, the president, that was Alec Sharmer, a British minister, he basically, when he saw, he was about to gavel the decision, when he saw China raises placard and pressed the button to say that they want to speak, and he had to recognize them. He wasn't fast enough to gavel, and they spoke up, and they said that we oppose, we oppose this use of the words phased out of coal, okay, and then, and also the other countries, like India also spoke up, and several other as well spoke up, opposed the words phased out of coal. So the counter proposal was, we prefer phased down of coal. Now, of course, you know the difference between English words phased down and phased out, right? I mean, is it clear to you what the difference is? Phased down, which is what China now got, first phased out, right? Phased out of course means zero. Phased out means decline, but it never said it could be zero, right? So India supported that as well. Now, the compromise then, now I'm talking about to have 26 now. So Alex Sharma was very pained. You could see the UN camera was focused on him, and I was able to watch this. I was already back home, but I watched it, and I thought, oh my goodness, you know, he could, he's seeing the whole thing unravel before him in front of him. He could see the whole thing unraveling, and he was very pain-looking. So he suspended the plenary meeting at that point, suspended it, and started walking around and started getting people together. And it was John Kerry, our special envoy. Now, John Kerry has a role of special envoy, so on the climate change issue, he has the same role, same level of protocol as Anthony Blinken, our Secretary of State. Okay, just want to give you a little bit of that diplomatic nicety. I would report to the President in the Cabinet with that role equal to Anthony Blinken. Anyway, so John Kerry started walking around because he was, of course, very concerned about this, too. And so he talked to the Chinese lead negotiator, his counterpart, and he went around. Now, it's funny that he didn't stop at the EU delegation. He did not stop. The EU said we buy into the compromise, but we are disappointed that we were not consulted. So you could see exactly why the EU person said that, because the U.S. person, John Kerry, never consulted them. So it was funny how all human beings, and you know, she wasn't consulted, so she really let John Kerry have it. It's funny when I see these things. Yeah, so the final compromise, as I said, was phased down of coal, of use, but phased out of fossil fuel subsidies. So India didn't get everything it wanted, and needed the China. But anyway, so that particular agreement was almost rolled back at this COP, at COP 27. So that I'm connecting dots for you. Of course, I'm not saying that China and India said those things in the closed-door session, but I have a very strong feeling that that's what happened. Okay, so number two, the mitigation work program to enhance nationally-determined contribution by some parties still needs to be completely fleshed out in 23 and 24. 2023 and 24. Now, here I will also share with you a little bit of a decoding kind of exercise how to read UN language. A mitigation work program, that sounds nice. It's actually when you have a work program in a UN decision, it actually means that the countries did not agree. They did not agree. But what they agreed to was to disagree, and so for the next two years they will work on it. So that is the work program. So whenever you see that in the UN Framework Convention decision, you know that the countries actually didn't agree, but they agreed to continue working. Which is nice, okay, which is still good. So they will continue to work. And they even have some further words in there to say what they will work on, and they will have some workshops, okay, some workshops to be negotiated in 23 and 24. So just note down those words in your future when you see work program in the UN context, you know exactly what that means, okay. Okay, number three was actually the biggest headline grabbing agreement out of the implementation plan, the Sharma-Sharkin implementation plan. Now I'll give you a bit of context here. This new loss and damage financial facility has been set, but there's no money in it. Okay, and I'll explain what that means. In the UN Framework Convention for the longest time since 1994, there's been money, there's two buckets of money historically. There's been the bucket of money for mitigation. That is the word for reducing emissions. So that is the first bucket of money and it's represented through the Global Environment Facility, or GEF, which is actually stewarded by the World Bank. So the World Bank actually has a lot of authority and a lot of influence over many of these funds of money. So it's for reducing emissions. And countries have to apply more or less to the World Bank as the dispenser of this money to get that money. So that's one bucket of money. And then there's a second bucket of money for climate change adaptation. And that is more or less represented through the Adaptation Fund, which was established a little bit later in the history of the UNSCCC. So there's money for that. And some of that money comes directly from the, what's in the Kyoto Protocol, coming from what's called the Clean Development Mechanism. So there's like a 2%, almost like a tax, 2% tax on the proceeds of the Clean Development Mechanism, which I won't go into too much details. It's about doing projects in a developing country. And then you do, and those emission reduction can be turned into credits. And those credits, you take 2% of that, sell on the market, and you can put those funds into this Adaptation Fund. So there's that second bucket of money on climate change adaptation. Now the third bucket of money has never been talked about, but if you think of it this way, I always try to use very practical everyday examples. You try to reduce emissions, and you do a lot to adapt your country, your infrastructure to these future impacts. But if you still get extreme events and you get problems, what happens? So your country is damaged, right? So what happens? Where do you turn to help your country to recover? Of course I'm not equating what's happening in Turkey now, but imagine this third bucket of money. That's what this was for, is to think about loss and damage, because there's never been this third bucket of money beyond the mitigation and beyond the adaptation. So since, I'll give you another story, since 2013 at COP 19 in Warsaw. COP 19 in Warsaw was the first time actually in my memory when countries actually came up with something called the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage. And there's no money in that either, but let me give you a story on that. A quick story on that is the first week of COP 19 to remember COP 21 was two years in the future. COP 19 is Warsaw, the lead negotiator, a technical negotiator. The lead negotiator is Mr. Sanorev... sorry, Danorev Sano, okay? That's his name. And when he stood up, or when he raised his flag in the first plenary, he said that, you know, the week before, Super Typhoon Haiyan, Super Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines, the East Coast Philippines, with a lot of this devastating force and basically destroyed half of the city of Sibu. Okay, the Cebu city was destroyed, half of it. And he's basically set in that first plenary, first intervention. And he said that he had family members who were injured and or killed. I remember there were deaths in his family. So the next few minutes later, he talked about he would go on hunger strike, which he did, for about five, six days. And because of that, there were a lot of people in the observers' community who were very sympathetic to what he was going through, and they too went on hunger strike with him for several days. So that, at COP 19, that set of negotiations was very emotional and very, I guess what he did was very impactful. And so at the end of it, finally, all the countries, after years of opposition, all the countries decided that, yes, they will have a Warsaw International Mechanism on loss and damage. Now, the countries that opposed this loss and damage were mainly, again, if you can make a guess which countries were opposed to this. Any good guess? Any guess? Same as last time. Same as last time, yeah, more or less, that's right. Because we, as a country, the United States and our European allies, argued that we should not be held accountable, liable, legal liabilities for any of this, for any hurricanes or anything. We're not liable because the science is not saying that we're liable. Okay, so the large countries basically have said, no, no way, we're not going to give any, first of all, we're not going to give any money. And most important, no legal liability so that no other country can take U.S. or E.U. to court, to the international court. So the legal liability question now is still there, but I think the only reason why the E.U. and the United States this time at COP26 agreed was because I think that legal liability question is still off the table, but countries now are willing to talk money, okay? They're willing to talk money but not because of liability, but because of the kind of a voluntary nature of that money to put money into a fund. So this fund, there's no fund yet. There is something called a transitional committee. It is being operationalized this year, and they will start thinking about all the criteria and processes of what this fund could do. Now, what do you think the things that they need the most in terms of setting up this fund? Well, I mean, I'll tell you. Just think of it like your insurance company. I mean, that's how I think about it. Think of it like your insurance company. You know, if there's been damage to your car or your house, whatever, you have to make a claim, right? So what is the claim process for all this? And what are the criteria for this claim process? And then, of course, if that claim is satisfied, then what would happen to dispense the money? How do you actually get the money, and how much and how frequent? All of that needs to be operationalized. So in the UN, you will see these kind of negotiations for the next two years, probably two years, to get that operationalized. So watch for this. There will be more to come on this money. Right now, there's no money. Like I said, it's just a box, empty box, no money. But all these procedures and criteria have to be operationalized, too. So it's not just simply getting the money. All right. Number four, it's also about money. A new collective quantified goal still needs to be negotiated in 2023, and these negotiations have to end in 2024. The reason for this is fairly straightforward. Again, at COP 21, which is 2015, that year the negotiations were also very fraught, very much fraught. Countries were pushing the wealthier countries to come up with money that will help the lesser developed countries to reduce emissions and or to adapt to climate change. So the Paris Agreement, if you have to understand the Paris Agreement at the heart of it, is really a voluntary agreement. We're back to the UNFCCC. I didn't even go through the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol is actually a mandatory agreement for some countries. So that didn't work. So the Paris Agreement years later became another voluntary agreement, and all countries can volunteer to do what they can. And these are called nationally determined contributions, or those of us in the community just call them NDCs. And these developing countries, almost all of them have NDC that's unconditional. That means they will, of course, do something without any conditions. And then there are NDCs where they will accept money. In fact, they need money to help them reduce emissions or adapt to climate change impact. Those are the conditional NDCs. So if you count up all the NDCs that are conditional and there's a certain amount of money that would be attached to it, you can actually arrive at a new goal for assistance, for financial assistance. So that's what some analysts have done. And that number could be anywhere in terms of... Well, I didn't even give you the old number. The old number was $100 billion a year. $100 billion a year for the period 2020 to 2025. Now, your next question would probably ask, okay, has that ever been done, has that ever been achieved? And my simple answer is no. No country has ever... There's been not enough money contributed at all to that $100 billion per year goal. The closest that they got to was like $90 billion in one year. And that's it. There was nothing cumulative about it. $90 billion in the last several years. So this goal has never been achieved, but the Paris Agreement actually stipulates that you must now negotiate for the period beyond 2025. You must have a new goal, and the stipulation is that that new goal, quantified goal, must be higher than the $100 billion a year. So this will be fraught. Negotiation will be fraught, starting this year in Dubai. Okay, whenever countries talk about money, they always drift very far apart and don't converge. And so the $300 billion is like the least amount that some analysts have found, but the high end is... It probably doesn't astonish me anymore, but the high end of it is about $5.5 trillion per year. Okay, not a cumulative number, but $5.5 trillion per year. Okay, so I'll let that sink in as well. So how do you think these negotiations go in Dubai? It's fraught. Okay, so that's my conclusion. So between countries, it's going to be... Whenever they talk about money, it's very hard to see them come together. Okay, Article 6 is more or less about cooperative approaches. It's about countries getting together and actually cooperate in terms of maybe emissions trading. So two or more countries could, under Article 6, paragraph 2, could decide that two or more countries could cap their total emissions at some level, and then they could actually trade emissions by reducing more than what the cap says. And so by doing that, they can then trade the excess emissions, credit or reduction as credit amongst each other, and that way they can look for the countries with the most cost-effective emission reduction and still be able to reduce emissions overall for a club or group of countries. So that's under Article 6, paragraph 2 of the Paris agreement. And Article 6, paragraph 2 procedures have been very well spelled out now. At COP 27, it received a lot more negotiation time and there was a lot of detailed agreement. 6.4, paragraph 4, is a lot slower, and that is a kind of agreement like the old clean development mechanism. It's a much more UN-focused, a UN-centered agreement where the United Nations would actually set up a supervisory body to actually approve projects to be done in certain countries and the emission credits would then flow from those actions. So those procedures, even though there are more details now at COP 27, there's still more details that need to be done, and so many of us expect 6.4 to be a lot slower coming out of the gate. 6.2 is ready, and there are lots of countries now doing bilateral agreements already. They haven't traded yet, but the countries like Singapore, Switzerland, together with seven and eight other development countries are starting to write bilateral agreements. But 6.4 is a lot slower. Okay, and I'll say one quick thing. Article 6 had the title of cooperative approaches in the run-up to the Paris agreement, and yet it failed to complete negotiations at COP 24, 25, and then the pandemic year when everything was skipped, and then 26 finally achieved agreement. So the one provision in the Paris agreement that was supposed to be enhanced cooperation actually had the least cooperation between countries, so it was kind of disappointing. Okay, I won't go into any more of this, but this is the Charme-El-Shake implementation plan actually there are 17 chapters, and I only cover those that are highlighted, and I didn't even do justice to any single one of them, except for a few examples. Okay, so I just want to show you, I spoke in the IPCC pavilion, the science pavilion, talking about carbon capture and geologic storage for industry, I talked about that. Now I want to focus on this one because this is, I'm at Stanford now, I'm with students and many people who could be in the youth NGO community, the youth movement. Now another part of the UN process you might find very interesting is I'm with a business community, so my constituency is called BINGO, Business Industry NGO, so a lot of people call me a BINGO. BINGO, okay. Environmental NGOs are ENGOs. Gender NGO for women and other gender issues would be just ENGO, and of course youth movement is YUMGOs. Okay, so I know I make that sound a little funny, but that's how the UN look at us, okay, by the way. UN look at us as not companies, but as constituencies. UN does not look at Sierra Club as one entity. UN look at the whole NGO as one big constituency. So I'm in one big constituency. The YUMGOs, this is the YUMGOs, okay. For the first time, obtained funding and it was on a part of the UN and several countries, donor countries decided that that we must allow the youth movement to have a strong voice. And so a pavilion was set up so that the youth movement could invite people to talk and actually think about and give input to the negotiation process. Now the reason for this, I'll give you a very practical reason. In COP24 and COP25, the youth movement's messaging to the UN, both at the official level and also in terms of demonstration and protest, became louder and louder and angrier and angrier in both circumstances, okay. At COP25 in Madrid, in fact there were like over 300 people who staged a very disruptive demonstration at one of the negotiating track, one of the negotiating rooms and disrupted that whole negotiation for hours, okay. So now that didn't do anyone any good because that simply delayed the process. And so those 300 YUMGO members were ejected from the, arrested by the UN police. And these are real police, by the way. The UN in the blue zone, the UN actually, they have police powers and they actually carry weapons. So they are real police and they ejected 300 youth movement people and debatched them as well, took away their badges so that they could not come back. Now whether they were permanently debatched, I don't know, but it's possible because they were very disruptive. But anyway, so having a YUMGO, for the first time a YUMGO pavilion doing very systematic and lots of side events I think was very helpful, much more helpful than before when there was no voice given to the youth, children and youth voice, okay. All right, so let me just show you some more pictures. Now these are the actual words from a decision package on the right hand side. So, and I'm just quoting just a few paragraphs and each of these decisions are pages long, four, five, six pages long. So there are lots of these decisions that were made and I just show you the actual negotiation itself is like this, okay. This is a little bit bigger room than what I showed you earlier. This one was probably not on technology, but on the new collective quantified goal, the money issue, which of course attracted a lot of the negotiators. So this was a big negotiation. And this too was a technical negotiation but it was held in the first week as a plenary held by the chair of the Mopanu Mopanu of one of the West African countries, sorry, forgotten, but Mopanu Mopanu was a chair, okay. And so this was a technology negotiation and you can see that that's what people actually do. They actually negotiate for hours over words and you can see the upper left corner there, the words there. And you know, in this particular case it's very close to final, okay. So there were no brackets. So when there are still this agreement the text itself would be bracketed and there could be options, sometimes option in the text. And that's exactly what happened in the, let me show you in this particular slide, okay, on this slide this is about technology, about technology transfer and development, okay. And on this particular slide, the U.S. negotiator, Mr. Erwin Rose, he was looking very, he was looking very intently, intently on the screen, and so is his counterpart in the EU, that woman there in the EU, from the EU. There are allies on this issue. And so when Argentina off-screen, when Argentina spoke up and inserted a few words on what they had proposed for this decision, they were intently looking at it and seeing whether it could impact how it could be handled in the future. So I think eventually this was at the end of the final hour of the final session, they had to make a choice. And they could either delete the whole paragraph or they could go with a compromise. So I think for this particular issue they went with a compromise. But if it's a bracket of text and they're all these brackets and you can't take away the brackets, that's bad news. That means very likely that you need to remove the whole paragraph. That's why sometimes these decisions, they don't read very well. They read very choppy. But this was the chair. She's from Austria and she basically threatened people saying if you don't come to some compromise, I'm going to invoke Draft Rule 16. And again, I told you what Draft Rule is mean. But Draft Rule 16 would have deleted everything that went on that whole session. The whole two weeks. Delete everything and the whole year before. So you would come back to this decision again next time, literally with a white sheet of paper. So I'll just end there. I know I took a long time but I hope you found it interesting because that's what really happens at these meetings. It's not pretty, but it is necessary. And I'll say that again. It's not pretty, but it's necessary. Everyone has a voice. Every single country has a voice. No voting, but every single country has a voice. There's no executive committee to make decisions for you or for the world. It's not a pretty council for climate change. Every single country has a voice. And that's why these cops are like this. And it's done every year so that this progress is slow but it's made. So I hope I've convinced you it's not a pretty process, but it's necessary. Thank you.