Senior fellow Charles Kenny's piece on climate change was features in Businessweek.
From the Article
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).
Disappointment at Durban will give environmentalists one more reason to gripe at the state of global leadership. They’ll have a point. The planet’s politicians have missed an opportunity to unite to confront the greatest global challenge of the new century. Yet at the same time, progress against global warming is being made at the individual country and regional level—which is good news, because for the foreseeable future that’s the only approach likely to work.
With the lack of progress on climate change in recent years, some environmentalists have been reduced to pinning their hopes on either the exhaustion of natural resources or the complete collapse of global capitalism to take care of the problem. But neither higher oil prices nor financial crises have significantly slowed the release of greenhouse gases. Because of new fossil fuel discoveries and new technologies that allow their extraction from deep seabeds or out of shale rock, global peak oil extraction won’t arrive until some time after Denver becomes a seaside resort. The global economic slowdown, meanwhile, has brought the silver filigree of temporarily holding down emissions in the developed world (2008 and 2009 actually saw declining greenhouse gas output in the U.S.). But a study released on Dec. 4 by the Global Carbon Project, an association of scientists, found that global emissions rose again in 2010 by 5.9 percent, the largest increase since 2003.