Climate Change's Dead Letters

The 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change took place this month in Durban, South Africa. Two things to note: First, climate change shows no sign of abating; second, it’s the 17th meeting. This was also the Seventh Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol, the only international agreement that legally binds some countries to agreed reductions in their greenhouse-gas emissions. The flaw in Kyoto is that it binds none of the world’s three largest polluters, which are responsible for nearly half of all emissions. The U.S. never signed the protocol, and India and China were exempted from emissions caps on the grounds that rich countries had done the majority of combusting, excreting, or otherwise expelling the gases causing the atmosphere such heartburn to date.

Remember UN climate meeting No. 15? That was in Copenhagen a couple of years ago, when President Barack Obama and fellow leaders stayed up half the night, seemingly hours away from a binding climate deal covering countries rich and poor. Today we seem not hours but years away from such a deal. The Kyoto Protocol expires next year—and the Durban meeting didn’t even seriously discuss a replacement. You might call this a glacial rate of progress, except we’re going backward (and glaciers are melting quite fast nowadays).