Cancún’s baby steps

Delegates from 193 countries agreed in Cancún, Mexico, last week on a framework for curtailing carbon emissions, but once again made little progress on binding commitments to reduce emissions that contribute to climate change. The meeting, the first global climate conference since last year’s rancorous gathering in Copenhagen, was convened amid low expectations. But it achieved some incremental progress, including the establishment of the following: a “Green Climate Fund,” which will, by 2020, provide $100 billion annually from wealthy nations to compensate poor ones for reducing their emissions; a separate system to compensate developing nations for preserving rain forests; and an agreement to create within the United Nations formal procedures for monitoring emissions reductions in the future. The deal “is not what is ultimately required,” said Christiana Figueres of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, “but it is the essential foundation on which to build greater, collective ambition.”

“Cancún was a success, albeit a modest one,” said the Financial Times in an editorial. Its real achievement was to establish a framework for cutting emissions “within the U.N. process for the first time,” laying the foundation for future action. Even so, “cautious optimism is not a comfortable place to be when weighing the future of the planet.”

Then let’s embrace realism, said Bjorn Lomborg in Slate.com. “Chasing a chimerical global agreement on carbon cuts, as in Cancún,” is a fool’s errand. So is swapping current cars for Priuses or standard light bulbs for energy-efficient fluorescent ones. Major reductions in emissions will come only when governments focus on developing new, carbon-free energy sources. Cancún mirrored the “abject failure” of last year’s meeting in Copenhagen, said Patrick J. Michaels in National Review Online. Copenhagen likewise exposed the Kyoto Protocol, which had failed to “legally bind” industrialized nations to reduce emissions. “It’s not easy to see the need for all these annual gatherings.”

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Cancún won’t save the planet, said Bryan Walsh in Time.com. But it was a clear “recognition that there will be no single grand-bargain deal on climate change. The politics are simply too complex and the problem itself too wicked to be solved in a single pact.” Progress will be piecemeal. Meanwhile, the toughest issues were “kicked down the road”—to next year’s meeting in South Africa.