By Alister Doyle
PARIS (Reuters) - To conclude a landmark global climate agreement expected to set off a trillion-dollar overhaul of the world's high-carbon energy system, there will be no vote, no show of hands, no acclamation.
Instead, the weighty task of officially sealing four years of global negotiations falls to the somewhat subjective judgement of French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who will call time on talks as soon as he believes 195 nations have finally reached a "consensus" on how to stop the world from warming.
Unusually, this method of agreement is stipulated for U.N. climate treaties, rather than a majority vote or unanimity, even though it is never actually defined.
Until 2009, U.N. climate conferences followed the procedures of the U.N. General Assembly, which state that a consensus is reached when all members "agree to adopt the draft resolution without taking a vote". In other words, the absence of objection is taken as agreement.
But that year the Copenhagen climate summit dramatically ended in failure when objections by a small group of countries managed to block a deal.
It will now fall to Fabius to decide whether to follow that approach or a more flexible interpretation of consensus, used in more recent climate negotiations, that has succeeded in overruling minority objectors.
It is a decision he will probably have to make while presiding over a vast hall with hundreds of exhausted delegates. In Copenhagen, the final session was uproarious - at one point, Sudan's delegate said rich nations' climate policies were as deadly as the Holocaust for Africa.
ENTER MEXICO
If Fabius's job is just a little bit easier, he can thank former Mexican president Felipe Calderon, who was determined to avoid the failures of Copenhagen when his country hosted the following year's talks in Cancun.
Calderon telephoned the left-wing Latin American leaders who had thwarted a deal in Copenhagen to enlist them for an agreement that would set a goal of limiting rising world temperatures. Bolivian President Evo Morales was the only one to refuse, he said.
But the president had a team of legal experts who were studying the laws of the United Nations to understand whether a majority vote was adequate to seal a global pact.
"We found that, in case of doubt, the presidency has the right and the duty of interpretation," he told Reuters.
It remained unclear which nations, or how many, could be ignored, but in Cancun, his foreign minister Patricia Espinosa banged down her gavel over the vociferous objections of Bolivia, which said the deal on offer was too weak to protect "Mother Earth".
"Patricia Espinosa, with a stroke of the gavel, changed the political norm from 'everybody' to 'almost everybody'," said Robert Stavins, director of Harvard University's Environmental Economics Program.
In 2012, conference host Qatar went a step further by overruling Russia's objections to a deal linked to extending the 1997 Kyoto Protocol - even though Moscow's delegate was waving his hands at the time trying to get the chair's attention.
Ignoring Russia was far more drastic than ignoring Bolivia. Even so, neither Russia nor Bolivia has formally challenged the legal basis of the decisions in the courts.
Would Fabius go that far? A French Foreign Ministry official declined comment, referring questions to the rules of the United Nations.
Reaching consensus does not anyway mean that an agreement in Paris will enter into force, because the bigger hurdle is often getting it adopted in national law.
Even before the Paris talks had started, most officials had given up any effort to craft a legally binding treaty, which the U.S. Congress would almost certainly refuse to ratify.
Some countries have in the past proposed that majority voting at climate conferences would be simpler - but this alarms some of the most powerful participants, including the United States and China, which fear being outvoted.
They are probably safe; changing the rules would require a consensus.
(Additional reporting by Emmanuel Jarry; editing by Jonathan Leff and Kevin Liffey)
