The governing council of ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organization, is meeting in Montreal starting Monday. The agenda: a brawl over how airlines will offset the carbon emissions of their international flights, which they are required to do under international law starting in 2021 under a system known as CORSIA . Under CORSIA, airlines will offset any growth in carbon emissions above 2019-2020 levels. They’re spending 2019 and 2020 counting their emissions to create the accounting baseline. But what happens now that coronavirus has grounded up to 25 percent of flights for some airlines? Do you delay implementing the system, change which year’s emissions are counted or push ahead regardless?

Climate versus cultural integration: The carbon question is wrenching for ICAO, a U.N. specialized agency built from the ashes of World War II aerial destruction. ICAO's cultural DNA equates civil aviation with peace-building, and a tightly knit group of airlines and regulators supports that reflex. Over the last decade, climate campaigners have clashed repeatedly with ICAO and the aviation industry over those instincts. ICAO has a more immediate political problem though: it loves consensus and there’s no consensus on handling carbon offsets. No one knows if there will be a majority vote next week to force through the detailed accounting and enforcement systems needed to make CORSIA work . Or perhaps scared officials will avoid a vote altogether by watering down CORSIA to the point where no one airline or government can dispute it. Unless they water it down too much, and generate green backlash.

Trade war the likely alternative: If CORSIA can’t be made to work ( and it could offset the entire emissions of the Netherlands each year if it does ) the risk is that EU and U.S. will fall back into a dispute that threatened to explode into a full trade war in 2011. The EU would operate a carbon tax on all flights in and out of the EU, and the U.S. would instruct its companies to refuse to pay (under a 2012 law so popular that it unanimously passed the Senate).

Airline alliances void usual rules of politics: In a regular global rule-setting conference, one country’s airlines and its government might work together to achieve a particular outcome, or the big players might dominate the small players. It's not that simple in aviation. The big individual airlines are members of global airline alliances. If big players are “swinging a big stick," they can quickly find that it "clobbers your fellow alliance members and ultimately yourself in the back of the head,” said Environmental Defense Fund’s Annie Petsonk. Green groups like EDF say their top priority in the Montreal negotiations is maintaining integrity of carbon offset reporting, and that the airlines were already granted generous terms in allowing 2019 and 2020 as base years for the reporting system.

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VIEW FROM THE CSO OFFICE — CHRIS WELLISE, CHIEF SUSTAINABILITY OFFICER AT HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE

Wellise told POLITICO’s Eline Schaart and Laura Kayali that while the EU is the global leader on sustainability policy debates, HPE’s data centers are “already applying practices that place us well ahead of where the (European) Green Deal might be.” Wellise supports (and helped develop ) the Swiss Data Efficiency Label. He now supports EU-wide adoption of the label because it accounts for “quality and type of energy” used by data centers (whether it’s renewable, for example) and the reuse of the energy consumed, such as the “handling of waste heat at the back end.”

For Wellise it’s important to re-imagine products and services. He’s inspired by Dutch company Philips, which is now selling lighting as a service. “There is this shift in mentality with companies when you shift to a service because you’re no longer trying to sell as much stuff as possible but trying to maximize outcomes for customers,” he said. Wellise wants EU and other national rules to let companies focus on where they can make the most green difference: “The life cycle impacts of a cell phone are very different from the ones of a server,” he explained. In the case of phones, the energy is used making them. In the case of servers, two-thirds of energy consumption is during the server's use.

Former Google and Facebook sustainability chief Bill Weihl has launch ClimateVoice , which hopes to mobilize students and employees to urge companies to take on green policies and push for green legislation.

MAILBOX — WHAT’S THE POINT OF TODAY’S CLIMATE SCIENCE? The U.N.’s global climate science body has won headlines and alerted policy makers to the dangers of global warming for decades. It’s not working: “There is a lack of response ... that’s the fact,” Hoesung Lee, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told reporters Monday at the launch of a week-long session in Paris. If the science alone isn’t producing change, isn’t it time for the scientists to think of new partnerships to help turn their results into action? Send your thoughts to [email protected]

SCALABLE SOLUTION OF THE WEEK — AI TO FIX FOOD SUPPLY CHAINS: Accenture's Rumman Chowdhury told my Protocol colleague Kevin McAllister: "Did you know that nearly 1.3 billion tons of food simply rots on shelves in stores due to poor infrastructure, and that this waste is identified by the U.N. as one of the top sustainability problems worldwide? Better predictive models to determine demand, combined with tracking technologies, can reduce that waste."

EUROPE’S CARBON NEUTRAL SEE-SAW: The European Commission on Wednesday presented each EU government with tailored reform advice to help each country become carbon-neutral by 2050. But these climate dreams and lectures aren’t reflected in the draft climate commitments the EU is yet to send to the U.N. under the Paris climate deal, according to the document obtained by POLITICO . They simply reiterate the “objective of achieving a climate-neutral EU by 2050,” which EU leaders endorsed in December.

GLOBAL GREEN GLANCES

The robots will take your energy now: Google’s new Luxembourg data center would use 12 percent of the country’s electricity but create only about 100 jobs .

French “low carbon label”: Environment Minister Élisabeth Borne announced the label as a financial incentive for farmers who dedicate a share of their land to protect and restore biodiversity. But is it too late for the French town drowning in a sea of illegally dumped trash from other European countries, but lacking the money to deal with it.

BP withdraws from three trade groups: American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, the Western States Petroleum Association and the Western Energy Alliance, over their climate policies.

America’s carbon offset accounting mega-hole: Companies have reported 63 million tons of carbon dioxide kept out of the air. But so far, only 17 million of those 63 million tons have been registered with the EPA .

Polarizing view: Plastic bags help the environment.