There is no denying the dedication and stamina of the environment ministers and diplomats who conduct these talks. But maybe the task is too tall. The issues on the table are far broader than atmospheric carbon levels or forestry practices or how to devise a fund to compensate those most affected by global warming.
What really is at play here are politics on the broadest scale, the relations among Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan and three rapidly rising economic powers, China, India and Brazil. Those relations, in turn, are driven by each countrys domestic politics and the strains the global financial crisis has put on all of them. And the question of climate equity the obligations of rich nations to help poor countries cope with a problem they had no part in creating is more than an environmental issue.
Effectively addressing climate change will require over the coming decades a fundamental remaking of energy production, transportation and agriculture around the world the sinews of modern life. It is simply too big a job for those who have gathered for these talks under the 1992 United Nations treaty that began this grinding process.
There is a fundamental disconnect in having environment ministers negotiating geopolitics and macroeconomics, said Nick Robins, an energy and climate change analyst at HSBC, the London-based global bank. Mr. Robins noted that the 20-year-old framework convention and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that amended it enshrined the two-tiered system in which so-called developed and developing countries are treated differently. China still is classified as a developing country and is thus exempt from any emissions limits, but it has a vastly larger economy than it had in 1992 and recently surpassed the United States as the worlds largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
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