A single, legally binding global climate treaty is impossible to craft and the United Nations should give up trying, focusing instead on measures to reduce global warming, former U.S. climate negotiators said.
“It’s completely unrealistic to continue talking about a single, overarching treaty at least for the next 15 or 20 years,” Tim Wirth, a lead U.S. negotiator at the Kyoto Climate Conference in 1997, said in an interview in Cancun, Mexico, where 193 countries are debating a new accord to cut global greenhouse-gas emissions.
