After three sleepless nights, delegates at a United Nations climate conference in Durban, South Africa, reached a last-minute compromise on Sunday. Among other things, they finalized an agreement, spelled out at a meeting last year, to create a fund transferring billions of dollars from rich countries to poor ones. That money will help poor countries make the switch to cleaner energy sources. But the negotiators failed to establish strict new targets to limit global warming. Does that make the deal a failure?
This compromise accomplishes nothing: How "pitiful," says Damian Carrington at Britain's Guardian. For years, we've needed a global plan to "tackle climate change." But all we really got out of Durban was a squishy commitment to devising a strategy by 2015 and implementing it by 2020. That delay "ensures beyond doubt that our children will be worse off than we have been," because they face an environmental challenge that makes Europe's financial problems look like peanuts.
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