Who’s bad? Brazil. Who’s worst? Switzerland

Among mountains of coal rises a ray of light with hope “And the Fossil of the day goes to…Switzerland!!”

By Sara Cattani y Edoardo Quatrale

_

Switzerland wins the prize for having behaved like a true tyrant on the third day of negotiations here in Lima. In fact, like clockwork, Switzerland comes first to the podium, taking the coveted trophy among the greatest adversaries: the United States and the European Union.

As has been reaffirmed in past days, in order to achieve the objective of limiting global temperature increase to 2 °C it is necessary to do more, and providing funding to help developing countries is definitely much needed. In today’s debate, Switzerland opposed to any binding agreement on how to finance to developing countries, adding that all requests or pressure in this direction could seriously undermine the success of the Conference.And unfortunately, our Brazilian friends caught in the act are the ones who ascend to the second step of the podium: during the negotiations, Brazil had argued that there is no double counting of emissions of CO2 in the Clean Development Mechanism. And what does all this mean? The CDM is a flexibility mechanism to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases through the implementation of projects in developing countries, avoided emissions generate credits.

The problem of double counting of credit in Brazil is very serious and needs to be addressed urgently.In fact, we can make a long list of reasons that led the country to win this award: not having signed the document at the summit in New York to commit to zero deforestation by 2030; not giving priority to clean energy; and have in fact increased deforestation in the Amazon in the past year.
But the real surprise of the day is the awarding of “Ray of the Day”, a ver rare award, but it symbolizes a ray of light amid so many fossil awards. The flower of hope was raised by AOSIS (acronym for: Alliance of Small Island States), the first group of countries to support during this COP the total elimination of CO2 emissions by 2050. What makes this victory even more important is that other countries have joined the provision of AOSIS, specifically AILAC (acronym in Spanish for: Independent Association of Latin America and the Caribbean) and Norway. Achieving this and then the transition to 100% renewable energy by mid-century is our only hope to stay below the limit of 2 °C. Certainly shifting investment and subsidies from fossil fuels to renewable energy is a good start.