Environmental Outlook: Durban

This morning on the Diane Rehm radio program their environmental outlook series focused on the Climate talks in Durban. Given the relative lack of mainstream coverage of the issue in the American media, it's worth a listen.

It is a pretty good intro into the talks and especially the U.S. position on the talk even though there is the usual tangential drivel about the science being "unsettled".  

Analyzing Commitments

If there is a theme to the climate meeting in Durban it may just be a quote taken from a member of the Climate Analytics group, "the ambition level is not sufficient". A cynic might suggest that this has actually been a fairly consistent theme since the UN process began in 1992. Despite the high hopes that the international process would be able to overcome this lack of ambition prior to the Copenhagen talks, it remains an open question whether this process can ever really produce the kind of overall impact that would reduce or forestall the worst effects expected from warming in the next century.

Climate Analytics is a non-governmental organization based in Germany that has dedicated themselves to quantifying the ability, or lack thereof, of the political process to reduce greenhouse gas emissions leading to increasing temperatures and climatic instability. Most of their work can be found on the Climate Action Tracker website.

Kicking the Can

In the Opening Plenary of the latest round of climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa, South Africa's president Jacob Zuma reiterated an increasingly ineffectual plea:

"For most people in the developing countries and Africa, climate change is a matter of life and death."

While few who understand the problem doubt the truth of this statement, the power it has to motivate political action has ebbed significantly in the years since Copenhagen. For many delegations the sense of urgency has all but disappeared. For both the European Union and the United States, success in Durban will be primarily defined by setting into motion some of the agreements made in principle last year in Cancun. In effect, this is settling on wallpaper before the house is built.

What can we expect from Durban?

The Death of Kyoto

Japan made headlines early last week when they came out and definitively stated that they would not support a continuation of the Kyoto Protocol. Based on what has happened up to this point in Cancun it may be time to formally declare the time of death for the Kyoto Protocol. This is especially worrisome to small island states and those countries that are considered most vulnerable to changing climactic conditions. The original Kyoto agreement was flawed from the beginning. The world's largest polluter at the time (the U.S.) never signed on to the agreement despite the fact that their negotiators helped to broker the deal. Many of the largest economies that did sign on, such as China and India, were not obligated to cuts because they were developing countries. The pledged emissions cuts were never seen as going far enough and there was no mechanism to generate any real pressure on countries who were not meeting their obligations under Kyoto.