You Can’t Bargain About Global Warming with Chemistry and Physics

Bill McKibben

The UN’s big climate conference ended Saturday in Cancún, with claims of modest victory. “The UN climate talks are off the life-support machine,” said Tim Gore of Oxfam. “Not as rancorous as last year’s train wreck in Copenhagen,” wrote the Guardian. Patricia Espinosa, the Mexican foreign minister who brokered the final compromise, described it as “the best we could achieve at this point in a long process.”            The conference did indeed make progress on a few important issues: the outlines of financial aid for developing countries to help them deal with climate change, and some ideas on how to monitor greenhouse gas emissions in China and India. But it basically ignored the two crucial questions: How much carbon will we cut, and how fast? On those topics, one voice spoke more eloquently than all the 9,000 delegates, reporters, and activists gathered in Cancún. And he wasn’t even there. And he wasn’t even […]