Earth Equity News

Hopes Fade for Comprehensive Climate Treaty. By John Broder, NYTimes, October 21, 2009. "With the clock running out and deep differences unresolved, it now appears there is little chance that the climate change negotiations in Copenhagen in December will produce a comprehensive and binding new treaty on global warming. The United States and a number of other major emitting countries have concluded that it is more useful to take incremental but important steps toward a global agreement rather than to try to jam through a treaty that is either too weak to address the problem or too onerous to be ratified and enforced. Instead, representatives at the Copenhagen meeting are likely to announce a number of interim steps and agree to keep talking next year. 'There isn't sufficient time to get the whole thing done,' Yvo De Boer, the Dutch diplomat who heads of the U.N. climate secretariat and serves as the de facto overseer of the negotiations, said late last week. 'But I hope it will go well beyond simply a declaration of principles. The form I would like it to take is the groundwork for a ratifiable agreement next year.' Negotiators have accepted as all but inevitable that representatives of the 192 nations in the talks will not resolve the outstanding issues in the brief time remaining before the Copenhagen conference opens in mid-December. The gulf between rich and poor nations, and even among the wealthiest nations, is just too wide."