Fiddling with words as the world melts

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http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12815686

Climate change diplomacy

Fiddling with words as the world melts

Dec 18th 2008 | BRUSSELS
From The Economist print edition

Global consensus on cooling the planet looks maddeningly elusive—but individual states and regional blocks may be stepping into the breach

IMAGINE that some huge rocky projectile, big enough to destroy most forms of life, was hurtling towards the earth, and it seemed that deep international co-operation offered the only hope of deflecting the lethal object. Presumably, the nations of the world would set aside all jealousies and ideological hangups, knowing that failure to act together meant doom for all.

At least in theory, most of the world’s governments now accept that climate change, if left unchecked, could become the equivalent of a deadly asteroid. But to judge by the latest, tortuous moves in climate-change diplomacy—at a two-week gathering in western Poland, which ended on December 13th—there is little sign of any mind-concentrating effect.

To be fair to the 10,000-odd people (diplomats, UN bureaucrats, NGO types) who assembled in Poznan, a semicolon was removed. At a similar meeting in Bali a year earlier, governments had vowed to consider ways of cutting emissions from “deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries; and the role of conservation ”. After much haggling, delegates in Poland decided to upgrade conservation by replacing the offending punctuation mark with a comma.

At this pace, it seems hard to believe that a global deal on emissions targets (reconciling new emitters with older ones) can be reached next December at a meeting in Copenhagen, seen as a make-or-break time for UN efforts to cool the world.

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