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Another in a Triple Crisis and Real Climate Economics Blog series on the Durban Climate Change Conference.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the world is again conferring about what to do about climate change, and again deciding to do very little. If it wasn’t so serious, it would be funny. The satirical publication The Onion greeted the COP17 conference in Durban, South Africa by announcing the release of a new report showing that global warming may be irreversible if no action is taken to prevent it before 2006; in an example of fair and balanced reporting, they also interviewed a critic who put the point of no return as late as 2010.

The real debate in Durban seems less realistic than The Onion’s satire. Should the Kyoto Protocol, currently scheduled to expire next year, be extended or replaced by a better agreement to limit emissions? Will the promised $100 billion funding for climate adaptation – let alone the larger sums that will actually be needed – somehow materialize? Or should we just agree to keep talking?

While others are not blameless, the United States is the leader of the do-nothings, the country whose inaction ensures a global climate stalemate. As long as the world’s largest economy, with the largest cumulative emissions and the greatest resources to tackle the climate crisis, refuses to act, others are not likely to move forward on their own. Yet there is not a snowball’s chance in Texas that any significant climate policy will survive the current U.S. Congress. (more…)

The U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP17) is taking place in Durban, South Africa. The Spotlight Durban series, a joint series by Real Climate Economics  and Triple Crisis, invites experts to comment on the negotiations and the prospects for real progress  addressing climate change in the months and years ahead.

From November 28^th through December 9^th, the world’s nations are meeting again to discuss solutions to the urgent threat of rising  greenhouse gas emissions, this time in Durban, South Africa. This meeting, the Seventeenth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, has been much less widely anticipated than the meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, two years ago. At that time, expectations were high, President Obama had just taken office, and for the first time ever literally dozens of heads of state were scheduled to attend a climate convention. Yet the result – a non-binding agreement called the “Copenhagen Accord” – was widely disappointing, and since then, the prospects for strengthening that agreement have only grown more remote. Indeed, even the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol (which the US did not ratify) is in serious doubt at this point.

One of the optimistic aspects of the Copenhagen Accord was the enshrinement of a commitment – of sorts – to trying to keep global temperature increase to less than two degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average (compared to a roughly 0.8ºC increase to date). Yet while within the mainstream scientific community this level is seen as anything but “safe”, the “realist” view of the negotiations is that even this level of ambition is nearly out of reach – a conclusion that is consistent with the recently released World Energy Outlook 2011, published by the International Energy Agency. Worse, it is plain to expert observers that the North-South conflict that has long been a primary obstacle to global cooperation is if anything growing worse, even as the traditional lines between developed and developing countries continue to blur. Given this reality, and the evident distraction of political elites in the US and Europe with domestic (or at least regional) economic problems, it is easy to argue that we might as well give up on the UNFCCC as a useful forum, and focus on “cultivating our gardens”, as it were, at local scales. (more…)