"Climate Disapora" - Extraordinary Loss Of Diplomatic, Legal Experts From US Govt. Since 2017
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“I really had been assuming that Clinton was going to win,” he says. Initially, (Ed. - Todd) Stern thought “wiser voices in the room” would convince Trump to remain in the Paris agreement. “Obviously that changed over time.” But he knew immediately that “it wasn’t good and we weren’t going to see anything like a bona fide climate change effort internationally or domestically”. In September 2017, a few months after Trump had announced his intention to leave the Paris deal, Stern travelled to New York to talk to old contacts as they gathered for the UN general assembly. He wanted to find out what other countries were thinking. How would the negotiations on the Paris rulebook, so critical to its function, be conducted with US leadership stripped away?
Word of the binary system being pushed by China and its allies was circulating. This was something Stern and Biniaz believed they had buried in Paris. If US climate diplomacy has had a defining theme over years and across presidencies, it is that its great rival China must be bound by the same conditions. If December’s talks deliver a dual rulebook, it could stop the US rejoining the deal under a different president, says Biniaz. Neither Stern nor Biniaz denies that making sure this doesn’t happen is guiding their involvement. Six current and former non-US diplomats interviewed for this story said they thought this was at least partly their goal.
Certainly, Stern heard enough in New York to continue turning up. Over the past two years he has dropped in to most major meetings. He lunches and listens and tactfully gives his views. His book has made little progress.
His travels have included a visit to Beijing in May this year, where Xie hosted him at Tsinghua University. The two spent a lot of time together, says Stern, talking about the state of the negotiations. “My lodestar is: what is the way in which we stay faithful to the Paris agreement?” he says. “Not what does the US want or not, because I can’t speak for the US, and it won’t come as a surprise to you that people aren’t all that interested about what the US likes or doesn’t right now.”
Ed. Emphasis added.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/03/save-paris-climate-agreement-from-trump
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