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I spent a year in Canada as a teenager in 1993 and ’94, living in the metro Toronto neighborhood of Scarborough, which for some reason Canadians think is hilarious. Aside from the unfortunate 1993 World Series — damn you, Joe Carter — I loved it. I was from white-bread suburban Pennsylvania, and Toronto was one [...]
There are deals and then there are deals. That’s my takeaway from the U.N. climate negotiations in the South African city of Durban, which finally concluded early Sunday local time — more than a day after the talks had been scheduled to end. Exhausted negotiators — seriously, look at these poor guys — managed to reach an [...]
However you slice it, the scientific news has not been good on the pace of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. The weekend saw a pair of new studies that confirmed the fact that—far from curbing greenhouse gas emissions—we’re warming the atmosphere faster than ever, even as the slow-moving U.N. climate talks underway now at [...]
I was fortunate enough to have the chance to lead a symposium on the future of climate policy back in April for the progressive periodical Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. The transcript has just been published. I had great panelists: Joe Aldy, an assistant professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the former White House adviser [...]
I’m back from Cancún, and I miss the weather there, if not the all-night hours of the assignment. You can read a longer version of my analysis of the conference over here, which includes some details on the last-minute drama as Bolivia tried to block adoption of the Cancún Agreements, only to be deftly overruled [...]
In a briefing for reporters before the Cancún climate summit began, World Resources Institute president Jonathan Lash summed up is expectations for the meeting in a made-up work: “CopenCun.” He meant that much of the work of the Cancún summit would involve tying up the many loose ends of last year’s meeting in Copenhagen, with [...]
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 [...]
Last year’s global climate change summit in Copenhagen ran into trouble for all kinds of reasons, but one of the first and worst was logistics. Too many people—more than 45,000—tried to jam into the Danish capital’s too-small Bella Center. The result was hours-long lines for security and accreditation, hot tempers and general frustration—not the sort [...]
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 [...]
It’s the most wonderful time of the year once more for environment reporters: the UN climate summit. Last year’s affair in Copenhagen was a frigid disaster, mostly a failure for the climate—but at least the food was terrible. Beginning on November 29, diplomats from more than 190 countries will spend two weeks (plus overtime) trying [...]
