Review: ‘Landing the Paris Climate Agreement’ By Todd Stern 

December 12, 2015, marking the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement, would “remain a great date for the planet” according to then-French President François Hollande. But what a monumental struggle it was to arrive at this moment. Landing the Paris Climate Agreement by former US Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern, is described as environmental history. But the book would be better viewed as testimony.

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The subtitle of the book is “How It Happened, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next.” The focus of the author is very much on how. It offers a behind-the-scenes description of every step that led to the Paris Climate Agreement, in exhaustive detail. We learn who was involved, what meetings they had, how the negotiators arrived at specific wording in various agreements, what they ate for lunch, and what color each delegate’s hair was.

Todd Stern is the ultimate American political insider, having worked with Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Michael Dukakis, and John Podesta, among others; indeed, he literally married into the Democratic Party (his wife was previously Hillary Clinton’s domestic policy advisor). Although he does not boast, he is also clearly a skilled negotiator and dedicated public servant, willing to take on “the one concern that brought both [American] business and labor together because they both hated my issue” – climate change.

A great deal of Landing the Paris Agreement consists of near-transcripts of each of the discussions that preceded the fateful 2015 gathering in Paris for the United Nations COP21 climate summit. However, the book’s value is principally in its contribution to the big picture. In particular, it offers a clear and thoughtful overview of how the Paris Agreement was built on the foundation of the deals negotiated in the previous decade: the US-China bilateral agreement led to the Lima COP20 deal, which laid the groundwork for the Paris Agreement.

We also get a good feeling for the sprawling and almost insurmountable challenges of getting such an agreement signed. When do secret negotiations with China make sense? How can small nations punch above their weight? When should you tell the Brazilian negotiator that you just happen to be there for the World Cup?

A difficulty of this type of record is that when things are going well, it doesn’t make a very good story. As such, the disastrous 2009 COP15 summit in Copenhagen is easily the most engaging part of the book because of its cartoonish drama. Then-US President Barack Obama crashed a secret meeting with former Chinese leader Wen Jiabao; Venezuelan negotiator Claudia Salerno literally waved around a bloody hand, which she had cut herself, to emphasize a point; and COP President Lars Løkke Rasmussen struggled to bring consensus to a fractured and combative group.

However, these moments of drama are rare. The description of COP16 in Cancun, a calmly handled, sober, and successful session, is hard to read about without drifting. Most of a climate negotiator’s life consists of long, back-and-forth discussions about tiny, albeit vital, points of language: “taken note of” vs. “adopted”, or a definition of “legally binding.” Tempers flare over these moments, and the participants’ bombastic rhetoric can seem out of place to someone not on the spot. 

Stern does a good job of helping the reader get through this sometimes mind-numbing process by describing the characters – “dour and perturbed” or “a husky guy with a halo of white hair.” We also see the conference rooms where they meet (then-US Secretary of State John Kerry’s office had a fireplace!) and what they drink (or not – yes to maotai, no to tequila). Stern brings in occasional moments of levity, such as comparing the way his then 9-year-old and 4-year-old sons negotiated where to eat dinner to the way his Chinese counterpart, Minister Xie Zhenhua, makes concessions.

The long, fraught relationship between Stern and Xie has the potential to be a story in itself. Two anecdotes in particular stand out in their contentious bond. First, in 2013, when Stern goes to bat internally to protect Xie from a misguided Washington complaint; and second, two years later, when Xie tells Stern that he will call him “younger brother.” Indeed, the pivotal moment when Stern sits in Kerry’s office in Washington and decides to negotiate a secret, bilateral agreement with China, the reader desperately wants to know what happened at Xie’s own meeting with his boss. 

Instead, Stern offers a fair account that acknowledges the contributions of many nations to the process. The voices of island nations figure prominently. Mexico cuts a surprisingly important figure in the tale, arriving again and again with clever solutions and calm ideas; in this light, the fact that the nation’s new president is a climate scientist makes perfect sense.

The eleven days of actual negotiations at Paris turn out to be more of the same: wonkish discussion of detail, endless fracturing and reforming of coalitions, descriptions of French stagecraft, a solid portrayal of Obama’s deft skills as a dealmaker, and four pages on the difference between “shall” and “should.” The last point is more important than you might think, by the way. “Shall” would make the agreement into a treaty rather than a deal, and, as such, require its approval by two thirds of the hopelessly-deadlocked US Senate. 

As it is the heart of the book, this section could have benefited from a bullet-pointed summary of the actual agreement, or perhaps a structure based on content rather than chronology. The short description in the “Postmortem” section tells, rather than showing, the importance of the deal; we need to leaf back several pages to find the hard goals and numbers that underlie the need for mechanisms on how national commitments will be submitted and updated.

The great sorrow of the Paris Agreement, of course, is the fact that four days after it was signed, newly elected President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the agreement. However, its success – and a testimony to its strength – lies in the surprising fact that it was not tanked by the American withdrawal; the rest of the world seems to have simply lumbered along all the same. 

By the end of the book, the reader is left with the feeling that climate negotiation is a hell of a difficult job; the understanding that the job is vital to our planet’s future; and enormous gratitude that we have people like Stern to do it.

Landing the Paris Agreement: How It Happened, Why It matters, and What Comes Next
Todd Stern
2024, The MIT Press, 280pp

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