They did it! After pre-announcing that no major decisions would result from Cancun talks and nearly two weeks of debates and discussions, the army of international climate change negotiators reached an agreement fully in line with the low expectations for it. In fact, they even managed to lower the bar on key issues.
Despite the recent reports showing the alarming advancement of global warming trends, climate negotiators at Cancun were destined to abandon the essential goal of mandatory emissions controls. The result, a set of voluntary, market-based incentives, is a worst-case scenario for the planet. These will not only spare polluters from having to reduce emissions, but they will also likely allow polluters to strip indigenous communities of their land rights as industries seek out carbon offsets.
When Ok Chin was a child, her mother brought her to an orphanage. The family was poor, and her mother heard that the girl would get fed and clothed. Ok Chin would get an education. Maybe if the family’s fortunes improved, she could rejoin her brothers and sisters.
What happened next was unexpected.
Cancun was not a surprise. Nor was it a failure. This much is easy to say.
But was it a success? This is a more difficult question. I used to have an irritating friend. Every time you made a strong, implausibly simple claim – something like “Cancun was a success” – he would reply “Compared to what?” It was a pedantic device, but it worked well enough. It made you think, which, I suppose, is why it was irritating.
Rumors running through the halls of the Moon Palace, the Cancun resort where delegates from the 192 countries that belong to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are meeting, paint a bleak picture of the possibility of moving toward a fair and effective climate deal in the near future.
The UN Climate Conference (COP16) in Cancun is turning out to be both anti-climactic and anti-climatic.
As deserts expand and droughts persist, desperate people begin fighting over the water that remains. Elsewhere, rising sea levels create mass migrations. These portraits of human tragedy caused by climate change have become environmental security threats that the U.S. military now worries about.
Following the failure of world leaders to arrive at any binding agreements during the last climate talks at Copenhagen, there appears to be little hope for meaningful action at the November/December climate change talks in Cancun, Mexico. In place of climate change skepticism, debunked by overwhelming scientific evidence, leaders are now relying on market-based mechanisms and technological fixes to further drag their feet and avoid confronting the economic model responsible for the crisis.
The debate over climate change generally transpires within the cloistered confines of expensive hotels, executive boardrooms, and diplomatic halls. As seen in the failure to arrive at binding agreements in Copenhagen, the talks are generally as sterile as the surroundings.
The gap between federal spending on military as opposed to climate security has narrowed since 2008. Compared to China, though, our progress is meager.
Though its military spending is not wholly transparent, it is estimated that China spends one-sixth as much as the United States does on military security, and twice as much on climate security.