NyTimes: Doha: Weirdly Tame and Dispirited

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By ROBERT B. SEMPLE JR.

 

The annual United Nations climate change negotiations this year in Doha, which wrapped up on Dec. 8, seemed weirdly tame and dispirited. There was minimal press coverage and, as Jennifer Haverkamp of the Environmental Defense Fund observed, there were “no people in polar bear suits, no passionate youth doing skits, no melting ice sculptures—no real infusion of energy.”  There was also no solid agreement on how to confront the threat of global warming by slowing the seemingly inexorable rise of heat-trapping emissions or by helping poor nations mitigate the inevitable damage or, preferably, both. That was not weird. These conferences have not produced a binding document since the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which was itself flawed because it asked nothing of big developing nations, and, partly for that reason, was never ratified by the United States Congress.