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OPERATOR: Welcome to the press call with U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question/answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. If you should require offline assistance, you may depress *0. As a reminder, today’s call is being recorded. Replay information will be given out at the conclusion of the call. Your host and speaker, U.S. Department of State’s Lauren Brodsky. Please go ahead.

MODERATOR: Thank you, and greetings to everyone from the U.S. Department of State. I would like to welcome our journalists who have dialed in from across the globe. Today, we are joined by United States Special Envoy for Climate Change, Todd Stern, from Havana. Special Envoy Stern will brief us on his recent trip to Brazil and Cuba and his talks there to advance U.S. efforts to combat climate change with countries in Latin America. We will begin with brief remarks from Special Envoy Stern, and then we will turn it over for questions. Please understand and bear with us, we may experience some technical difficulties during the call.

At any time during the call if you would like to ask a question you must press *1 on your phone to join the queue. Today’s call is on the record and will last approximately 30 minutes. And with that I am pleased to turn it over to Special Envoy Stern.

SPECIAL ENVOY STERN: Thank you very much Lauren. Thanks everybody for being on the call. I’m going be very brief at the top and then take questions.

We met in Havana today with a number of people and had very good meetings so far. Met with the Cuban Minister of Science, Technology and the Environment, Dr. Elba Rosa Perez. Met with the Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs, Marcelino Medina. Met with the lead Climate Negotiator, Pedro Pedrosa and this afternoon shortly after we do this press call actually, I’m going to meet with Minister of Energy and Mines, Alfredo Lopez, and also going to visit Cuba’s Institute of Meteorology.

We have had broad discussions on various aspects of climate change and have exchanged views on first of all what our two countries are each doing domestically on climate change with respect both to mitigation and adaptation, and also on a range of issues involving the negotiations leading up to the Paris Conference.

I think it’s been a very good exchange of views, it is very rewarding to be able to have these conversations now, having relations restored between our countries and I think that although there’s an immediate focus with respect to Paris, I think both sides see that inasmuch as we are close neighbor countries, and inasmuch as climate change is an issue that’s going to be with us for a long time, this we hope is the start of a very productive relationship that will last long past Paris; of course Paris is the first order of business.

So with that let me open it to questions.

MODERATOR: Great, thank you Special Envoy Stern. As a reminder please press *1 on your phones to join the question queue. Our first question will come from Lisa Friedman with Climatewire.

QUESTION: Hi, thank you. First of all can you hear me okay?

SPECIAL ENVOY STERN: Yeah, who is the question from?

QUESTION: Lisa Friedman from Climatewire.

SPECIAL ENVOY STERN: Oh Lisa, hi Lisa.

QUESTION: Hi, thank you for doing this. Two questions, the first is can you talk a little bit about how this came about other than Cuba standing with ALBA countries in Copenhagen, I can’t remember the last time I really wrote about Cuba in the context of the negotiations. Was this kind of a product of opening relations and looking at a place to sort of dialogue with Cuba and kind of take us a little through the timeline? Along those lines, Cuba has been very aligned with a group of countries that have been obstructing various things in the talks. Did you get the sense that opening a dialogue with Cuba can help some of those last minute possible dramas in Paris?

SPECIAL ENVOY STERN: Thanks Lisa. The idea to do this actually arose in the context of my participation in the French informal meeting in July, it was July 20 as it happened, because in the French alphabetical order we sit quite close to Cuba and it happened to be the day when both of our embassies were opening. I started talking to my Cuban counterpart and had a bilat with him at the end of the meeting and we both agreed it would be a good idea to continue the conversation. And so I kind of had it in mind from that time on to try to come down here and we then on both sides just went about trying to set up the time and the scheduling and I think it’s a quite good thing.

We talk to countries all over. My deputy was in Bolivia this year, we’ve talked regularly at meetings that we both attend with Venezuela, so we talk to everybody including countries in the ALBA group, which I think it’s important to do that. In that context, I thought it would be a quite useful thing to talk to Cuba and obviously to take advantage of the fact that diplomatic relations have been restored, so this is something that we can much more readily and easily do than before. So in that respect I thought it was good. By the way, I visited Nicaraguan Ambassador to Washington at his residence during the summer and spent over an hour with him. We reach out to all different players and even if we have different views on some things, my approach basically is to try to explain as clearly and directly and candidly as I can what the U.S. approach is and try to hear the same from them and that’s the way business gets done and try to make progress as we get into the final lap for Paris.

MODERATOR: Thank you. Our next question will come from Margo McDermott with CBC.

QUESTION: Hi Mr. Stern, I’m the Environment Reporter with CBC in Ottawa and as you know we have a new liberal government that is already pledging to head to Paris with a fairly large delegation. Other than the fact that they’re new and they’re different from the previous government, what is the bottom line thing that the Canadian Delegation must do in Paris regarding our targets and just cooperating with the other countries?

SPECIAL ENVOY STERN: Thanks Margo for the question. I don’t know I would say this or that is the bottom line for what the Canadian delegation needs to do. We have worked consistently and constantly really with the Canadian Delegation since I’ve been in this job and whichever government is leading the country. I think that I would say about Canada is the same for the United States or other players that we need to focus our minds as effectively as possible on advancing solutions that will ensure the ambition of this agreement, the transparency of it, form a differentiation that works for 2020 and beyond, and solid provisions on financial systems for developing countries. I think that the Canadians have been good partners in those discussions throughout and I have every expectation that they will continue to be. I wouldn’t lay down some requirement that I have because I don’t tend to try to think about things that way. But I am confident that Canada will be a strong and constructive player in these talks.

MODERATOR: Thanks Todd. Our next question will come from Valerie Volcovici with Reuters.

SPECIAL ENVOY STERN: Hi Valerie.

QUESTION: Hi Todd. Just to go back to Cuba for a second, as far as their energy needs, obviously they are in a period of huge transition and can take a certain energy development path. Were there specific needs that they kind of addressed that they need energy-wise, technology-wise? Where do they stand right now in terms of the choices they can make?

SPECIAL ENVOY STERN: Valerie that’s a good question but as it happens my meeting with the Minister of Energy is coming up this afternoon so I don’t --, what you’re asking hasn’t really come up in a detailed way. The Minister of Science, Technology and Environment alluded to the fact to that that discussion on those kinds of issues actually would be part of what we do this afternoon. I know that there is a big focus on quite significantly increasing the percentage of renewable energy in their energy mix. But I guess I have to say that question is a little bit pending conversations this afternoon.

MODERATOR: Thank you. As a reminder you can press *1 on your phone to join the question queue. Our next question comes from .

QUESTION: Hi, thank you very much for doing this.

SPECIAL ENVOY STERN: Hi Suzanne.

QUESTION: Hi, I was wondering if you could characterize a little bit in Bonn and also in Cuba, what the international reaction is to the big pushback that we’re seeing from Congress, states and industries to the EPA Power plant rule and to their idea of a climate agreement. I think about half of the Senate now and more than half the states have come out against agreement. There is a demand for an agreement to be submitted to the Senate where in the present composition it would fail. Has this in the your travels, have you encountered doubts about, you know, has this shaken people’s confidence in the U.S. ability to deliver on its target and what are you telling people on the road, how are they reacting to this?

SPECIAL ENVOY STERN: Thanks Suzanne. I actually don’t think so. And what I do encounter as I talk with everybody is a sense of really much more confidence in and respect for the intensive effort that the United States is making under President Obama’s leadership and the whole team, Secretary Kerry, and Moniz, and taking the power for the EPA and so forth. Across the board of our economy big steps are being taken. Now with respect to the power plan, the Clean Power Plan in particular I don’t think people are or should be worried about that. It is standard operating procedure in the history of environmental regulation in the United States that when the EPA lays down an important regulation it gets attacked. It has never not happened. It gets attacked. In Congress gets attacked by various players in the world of whoever is being regulated, who wring their hands about the dire impacts that the regulation is going to have on the economy. In the vast majority of cases the courts uphold or there’s actually support in Congress to uphold any such regulation. We don’t have any doubt that that’s going to happen here. The Supreme Court twice has ruled that CO2 is a pollutant under the Clean Air Act and can be regulated under the Clean Air Act and that’s exactly what we’re doing. I don’t think that, as I say this is to be expected but not more than that. I think that obviously countries sometimes ask about what’s going on because nobody has full insight into another country’s political system and regulatory system, I don’t see a lot of anxiety about that. There are questions asked with respect to the Senate that you just raised, but again I don’t think there’s undue anxiety.

MODERATOR: Thank you. As a reminder, you can press *1 on your phones again to join the question queue. Our next question comes from Dean Scott with Bloomberg.

QUESTION: Hi Todd. Thanks for doing this. Quick question on loss and damage. There was language in the co-chairs text go into Bonn on that particular topic but there seemed to be a lot of skepticism there that the U.S. will accept language that may be read as committing developed countries to responsibility or financing or both for Bonn impacts already being felt. I wondered if you could take us through for just a minute on whether you see loss and damage being in the final agreement and at least some sense of what the U.S. would definitely not draw a line in the sand on not supporting in the deal.

SPECIAL ENVOY STERN: Thanks for the question. I never practice literally the art of what we’re going to do or not do in the context of press conferences so I’m not going to do that now either. But I will give you kind of a general orientation which is; first of all I want to disentangle the idea of a loss and damage on the one hand from the idea of compensation and liability on the other hand. Loss and damage, as an idea, is meant to refer to impacts of climate change that neither mitigation nor adaptation has been able to address, and insofar as there is a focus on that kind of an element of climate change impact it’s completely appropriate and we don’t have any problem with it. We obviously do have problem with the idea, and don’t accept the idea, of compensation and liability and never accepted that and we’re not about to accept it now. I can’t tell you what is going to be in the agreement and not going to be in the agreement but I will tell you that the United States is not going to accept compensation and liability being in the agreement but that is not meant to fully address what language might or might not be in what part of the outcome regarding loss and damage in and of itself, the compensation and liability we’re not doing.

MODERATOR: Thank you Special Envoy Stern. We’re going to take three more questions so if you’d like to join the queue please press *1. Our next question comes from Alex Nussbaum with Bloomberg News.

SPECIAL ENVOY STERN: I’m not hearing so well right now, is that Alex.

MODERATOR: Alex are you there?

QUESTION: How’s this?

SPECIAL ENVOY STERN: Yeah, I’ve got it now.

QUESTION: Okay, you have to unmute your phone, I am finding. Just another non-Cuban question, we’re also on the cusp of another Montreal Protocol meeting and I wonder if you could talk about what you think we realistically can expect about that on the HFC front and where HFC, their importance in the overall climate agenda?

SPECIAL ENVOY STERN: Thanks Alex. We have seen HFC’s as an important area in which we can make real progress. People who care, countries who care about ambition and there are a great many who do, ought to be completely supportive of the notion of a Montreal Protocol amendment to phase down the use of HFC’s over time. There’s a huge upside opportunity in doing that and I have seen estimates as high as 90-Gigatons of CO2 equivalent that can be saved between now and 2050, I’ve seen estimates that a half a degree Celsius could be saved from being added to the total over the course of this century. Those are huge numbers. Even though HFC’s are relatively short lived and are not at all the same scale of the problem of CO2 which last for hundreds of years. They are still very important and could give us as we hopefully accelerate the transition to low carbon economies globally. Doing the right thing on HFC’s could give us a lot more time before a tripwires hit. The U.S. has been a very strong supporter of HFC action for a long time; we were a prominent leader in the effort to get 100 or 110 countries, already a few years ago now, to sign onto the resolution saying we should do this. You may remember that an agreement on using the Montreal Protocol to save on HFC’s was a part of President Obama’s first meeting with President Xi in Sunnylands of June or July of 2013, I think that was. And a follow up statement about that was made in the common margins of the G20 meeting that same year. We are big, big, big supporters of action on HFC’s under the Montreal Protocol. The meeting as you said, this year’s meeting of the Montreal Protocol is coming up. I very much hope and both I and others in this administration are working hard to make progress on an amendment at that meeting. We have put forward a kind of two phase approach where an initial amendment taking some steps could be agreed to now and then further action to be followed up next year. I can’t give you -- I can’t, handicap, what the likelihood is, only to say that we are fully committed, the President is fully committed, the Administration is fully committed and again for all of those who care about climate change and who care about ambition in climate change. And again, a great many countries beat the drum on that correctly in the context of the climate talks, this should be a no brainer, so I hope we can make progress.

MODERATOR: Thank you Special Envoy Stern. It looks like that is all the time we have for today’s call so I’d like to thank Special Envoy Stern again for his time and all of our journalists for dialing in. That completes today’s call.

SPECIAL ENVOY STERN: Thank you very much.

MODERATOR: Thank you.