PLASTICS PRESSURE — The Biden administration is facing pressure from all sides as its negotiators take their middle-path case to Canada’s capital this week for the fourth of five scheduled rounds of talks aimed at landing a deal by the end of the year to slash plastic pollution. U.S. representatives are doubling down on their positioning, even as the politics around plastic pollution grows increasingly intense and polarized with key allies forming a High Ambition Coalition calling for binding plastic production limits and rivals like China and Russia pushing for an agreement focused on waste management. The stance is dismaying to observers in Ottawa, your host reports. “The congressional delegation that is here, and I certainly share this, feels the U.S. should be taking more of a leadership role in seeking to capture the high ambition vision,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, the Oregon Democrat leading a group of five U.S. lawmakers at the talks, said in an interview. “By saying that everyone needs to be able to buy in, and just nations will figure them out for themselves by using the Paris (Climate Accords) model, we're basically saying that we're not going to lay out a framework that will actually tackle the problem.” Lead U.S. negotiator Jose Fernandez, who serves as undersecretary of State for economic growth, energy and the environment, was remarkably frank at a Monday event in laying out the Biden administration's vision for an agreement. “Some may say that we need to ban plastics completely, but the ambition of this agreement will be limited if only a small percentage of the polluters and consumers of the world are able to implement their work,” Fernandez said. “As for the U.S., we aim to be an honest broker in this process. And that starts with being honest about our own limitations at home, which include federal authorities, complex and varying sub-national governmental approaches, and the fact that the science is not yet clear in developing sustainable alternatives to plastic materials.” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who is part of the congressional delegation at the talks, said approaching the negotiations with self-imposed constraints based on current law risks “condemning ourselves to failure.” The State Department pushed back on Whitehouse’s assertion, with an official noting the need to set policy positions rooted in domestic authority so that other countries can take the U.S. at its word. The conflict highlights that central tension facing negotiators over whether they should adopt an agreement that the U.S., China and other major economies might not join, or risk sinking to the lowest common denominators in order to get all countries on board. This week’s talks could go a long way toward determining whether those complications can be resolved in time to meet the ambitious deadline of striking a deal by the end of the year. “I'd say that compared to other processes, this is a negotiation where geopolitics is not that toxic,” said Anne Beathe Tvinnereim, Norway’s minister of international development, a co-chair of the High Ambition Coalition. “I'm not saying it's easy, but I think this is an arena where we can really have a success story at a multilateral level. And the world really needs that.”
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