This up and coming COP16 in Mexico is assuredly accursed.
December’s climate summit in Mexico is that some delegates might stay awake during the meetings.
When talks fail once, as they did in Copenhagen, governments lose interest. They don’t want to be associated with failure, they don’t want to pour time and energy into a broken process.
As an example, let’s just take a look at the process of the GATT negotiations timetable on world trade. Nine years after the world trade negotiations moved to Mexico after failing in Qatar, they still remain in diplomatic limbo. Nothing in the preparations for the climate talks suggests any other outcome.
A meeting in China at the beginning of October is supposed to clear the way for Cancun. The hosts have already made it clear that it’s going nowhere: there are, a top Chinese climate change official explains, still “huge differences between developed and developing countries.” Everyone blames everyone else for the failure at Copenhagen. Everyone insists that everyone else should move.
But no one cares enough to make a fight of it. The disagreements are simultaneously entrenched and muted. The doctor’s certificate has not been issued; perhaps, to save face, it never will be. But the harsh reality we have to grasp is that the process is dead.
The Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012 the only global deal for limiting greenhouse gas emissions. There is no realistic prospect that it will be replaced before it elapses: the existing treaty took five years to negotiate and a further eight years to come into force. In terms of real hopes for global action on climate change, we are now far behind where we were in 1997, or even 1992. It’s not just that we have lost 18 precious years. Throughout the age and the year of good intentions and grand announcements we spiralled backwards.
Nor do regional and national commitments offer any more hope, than the lack of a deal.
Only hope rests through the thousand of activist gearing up to be in Mexico and fight for an honest deal.
Yours,
Pano
PS:
While you are travelling to Mexico – Please don’t forget to bring vaseline and milk of magnesia.
Big bottles
