FITS AND STARTS — ‘Tis the season for major global environmental summits. As delegates prepare to descend on Dubai for international climate talks that could get a boost from warming relations between Washington and Beijing, negotiators working on a U.N.-led plastics treaty are reeling as those talks seem frozen in place. The third of five planned rounds of talks toward a global plan for tackling plastic pollution ended Sunday with no clear path to whittling down draft text. Negotiators appear to be no closer to ironing out differences over critical issues such as financing, universal obligations, single-use plastics, chemical content and production limits. The goal of finalizing a deal by the end of 2024 has always been viewed as an ambitious one. And a new coalition of countries including Saudi Arabia, Russia, China and Iran has only complicated the political dynamics. “What's frustrating about it is that it was the voices of a few that really derailed it for many,” said Erin Simon, the World Wide Fund for Nature’s head of plastic waste and business, who was in Kenya for the latest round of negotiations. “We didn't see the political will to overcome those few voices, and we really needed to.” With no mandate to pen a first treaty draft before the next round of talks in April, significant movement on key issues will be needed for there to be any hope of striking a deal by the end of next year. “Absent a major course correction, Canada will host a polite but massive failure when talks resume in Ottawa next year,” Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for Environmental Law, said in a statement. As battle lines are drawn, the role of the U.S. is coming into clearer view. The European Union is part of the High-Ambition Coalition, which is calling for production cuts, while China is arguing that any kind of restriction on plastics exceeds the mandate of the treaty. The U.S. wants each country to “take measures to reduce demand for primary plastic polymers that present a demonstrated risk of concern to human health or the environment,” putting the country in the position to serve as mediator. “There was a benefit to the United States not being in the HAC,” a State Department official said in an interview before the talks in Nairobi, nodding to the diplomatic value of not aligning with some of the more far-reaching proposals. Of course, it remains to be seen what any middle ground here actually looks like within the new political boundaries established by countries like China and Russia. EU members and others in the High-Ambition Coalition may end up being forced to decide whether a treaty that falls short of what they want is better than no treaty at all. More than 100 countries support global bans and phase-outs of the most harmful and avoidable plastics, and 140 countries want to establish global binding rules as opposed to a treaty-based solely on voluntary actions, according to WWF. Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), along with Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) want the U.S. to align more with that view, calling for a stronger approach in a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. If nothing else, countries’ cards are now on the table. We’ll see how they are played in April, when the tick of the clock will be much louder.
| 
