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ABIGAIL BORAH, 21-year-old Middlebury College junior, interrupting U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern at the U.N. climate change summit in Durban, South Africa. The U.S. has come under sharp criticism from the international community and environmentalists for standing in the way of further action on global warming, though Stern indicated that the U.S. [...]
After the disappointment of Copenhagen and a year when the viability of the UNFCC was repeatedly called into question, the world has its first new legal agreement on climate change in years. The deal is modest—there are no new binding pledges to cut carbon emissions, no hard figures in climate aid and some of the [...]
You don’t have to be in Washington to hear the howls of progressive Democrats enraged by what they see as President Obama’s capitulation to the Republicans on taxes—they’re audible all the way down here in Cancún. (Twitter helps.) As Timothy Noah of Slate puts it, Obama seems to be an easy mark, a terrible [...]
It happens at nearly every international climate summit. Usually about halfway through the two-week long summits, there will be an outcry about “secret” texts being negotiated in secret by the big countries of the world, dealing over the heads of poorer and smaller nations—which happen to be the ones that will be hit hardest by [...]
I’ve just arrived in Cancun, where the 16th meeting of the Conference to the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is in full, acryonymized swing. It’s already clear that the mood in Cancun—like the weather—will be quite different from the chaotic atmosphere at the U.N. talks in Copenhagen last [...]
