The vanishing point

Lower your expectations for Copenhagen, says Foreign Affairs journal 3

Michael A. Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations, writing in the September/October Foreign Affairs, finds “vanishingly small” odds that December’s international negotiations in Copenhagen will produce a comprehensive climate treaty.

From the journal’s summary (emphasis mine):

“Government officials and activists should fundamentally rethink their strategy and expectations” for the December climate conference in Copenhagen, argues Michael A. Levi, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. According to Levi, the odds of signing a comprehensive treaty in December are “vanishingly small.” With this in mind, rather than aim for a broad global treaty, negotiators should reinforce existing national policies and seek “international cooperation focused on specific opportunities to cut emissions” in rich nations and the developing world. Levi urges officials to view the conference as a chance to build efforts to cut emissions from the ground up, and try to “reinforce developed countries’ emissions cuts and link developing countries’ actions ... to objectives in other areas—such as economic growth, security, and air quality—that leaders of those countries already care about.”

Jonathan Hiskes is a Grist staff writer. He reports, tweets, eats, asks questions, self-promotes, looks out windows, and wonders if it could be like this.

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  1. Amber Katherine Posted 2:51 pm
    13 Aug 2009

    Throw the fracker out the air lock!

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    1. Christopher S. Johnson's avatar

      Christopher S. Johnson Posted 10:43 am
      14 Aug 2009

      Agreed.  This kind of stuff becomes self-fulfilling prophecy.It is merely hard, not impossible.

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  2. veritone Posted 7:34 am
    16 Aug 2009

    As George Monbiot points out: "Any change worth fighting for will be hard to achieve; indeed if the struggle in which you are engaged is not difficult, you may be confident that it is not worthwhile, for you can be assured by that measure that those from whom you need to wrest power are not threatened by your efforts. We will know that our approach is working only when it is violently opposed."Seen in this light, perhaps even the near violent encounters at Town Hall meetings might be regarded more encouragingly. If the quantity of dollars corporations are devoting to defeat health care and comprehensive clean energy legislation are an indication, we are surely on the right path. Can anyone doubt that this change is worth fighting for?

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