The UN Is Failing to Save the World. Here’s What Might.
Global climate negotiations are faltering, but that doesn’t mean the fight against a heating planet is a lost cause.
As much as voters claim to care about it, climate still has all the political juice of a year-old lemon.
Photographer: STRINGER/AFPJaw-jaw may be better than war-war, but when it comes to climate change, the world’s jaw is apparently wired shut these days. If we hope to avoid the most catastrophic planetary heating, we might soon need something to fill the role that global climate negotiations have long played — if such a thing even exists.
United Nations talks on curbing the use of plastics ended in failure last weekend, just days after the failure of the latest round of UN climate talks, which came soon after the failure of UN biodiversity talks. As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague David Fickling wrote in response to the plastics debacle, “the entire edifice of environmental diplomacy is creaking.”