Follow-up to my post on the Paris climate agreement.
To help you out – and to check for myself whether I hadn’t got the whole thing wrong – I’ve had a go at redrafting the Vice-Chairs’ non-draft in their non-paper, shrinking all options to one. It’s now comprehensible and of reasonable length (11 pages). Link to downloadable version.
The selection was entirely personal and has 0 promises of votes. I just took whichever option that seemed strongest, clearest or shortest. So what you have is in the top decile of the large universe of possible texts that could emerge from the drafts on the table. The outcome will almost certainly be worse than the King James Version: fuzzier, weaker, and more confused. But it probably won’t be that much worse.
For the most part, I resisted the professional bureaucrat’s temptation to improve. In three cases, explained in the intro, I thought it was essential. My changes (not selections) are marked in red.
Given a free hand, I could clean it up and cut it down a lot more. Dream on.
With any known make of pen, snarled Mitty, I could have redrafted the treaty at 1000 miles to six pages with my left hand.
[Cross-posted at The Reality-Based Community]
