The true measure of the work ahead here in Paris revealed itself at 8 a.m. this morning. After three days of negotiations and closed-door line edits, a new draft agreement was released for public consumption. And while the flaws and shortcomings of this latest incarnation are hyper dependent on whom exactly you are speaking with, one thing is certain; progress towards a real and meaningful deal is actually happening. It is certainly baby stepping along, but it is getting there. Well, maybe.
First and foremost, the draft has managed to both grow and shrink from its pre-conference size. The overall length has been reduced to just 50 pages, and the total word count has been cut by about 8 percent, both metrics providing glimmers of growing consensus among the nearly 200 countries trying to negotiate the deal. The number of “options” in the draft — areas representing more significant issues of discord between parties — has been similarly reduced from a total of 228 just a few days ago to some 205.
Even more demonstrative of inching towards a compromise is that certain big-ticket sections of the document have been successfully hashed out to the point where they no longer have any brackets left to be resolved. (Brackets within the draft treaty’s 26 “articles” signify established points of contention between countries, and all of them must be figured out or stricken before a vote on the agreement can be called for).