Guardian : UN Can’t Fix The Climate – Send $Billions Anyway

Why the UN can never stop climate change

On Sunday in Thailand diplomats opened another round of formal United Nations talks on global warming. For more than 20 years, the UN has been working on this problem, with little progress. Expectations have never been lower. The December 2009 conference in Copenhagen that was supposed to finalise a new treaty to replace the expiring Kyoto protocol ended in deadlock. Last year’s talks in Cancún ended without agreement on most of the important new issues.

Some of the troubles with global warming diplomacy are unavoidable. Stopping climate change is one of the hardest challenges the international community has undertaken. The main cause of climate change, emissions of carbon dioxide, is intrinsic to the burning of fossil fuels that power the world economy. Even in the best of circumstances, getting off carbon will take decades and trillions of dollars. The world economic crisis makes that even harder as few societies choose to spend money on distant problems when they face more immediate challenges such as unemployment and poverty.

More progress will come from shifting efforts on three fronts. First, while the UN talks should not be abandoned, most diplomacy should shift to smaller forums which engage just the largest countries. In fact, 10 countries (treating the EU as one) account for nearly four-fifths of all warming emissions. Working with those 10 will be complicated enough. That group of big polluters includes some that are willing to devote massive resources to the problem, such as the EU, and others that are a lot more reluctant – among them, China and the United States. The enthusiastic nations have been the biggest backers of the UN approach because they are best able to make strict, binding agreements. But what works for the EU fails for most of the rest of the world that is more skittish about binding commitments that they might not be able to honor.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/