Solving climate change: All in a day's work?

Children take part in an action organized by the Avaaz NGO, to promote 100% clean energy during the Paris climate summit.

By Julia Kingsley and Jon Healey

Dec. 11, 2015 12:26 PM PT

The United Nations climate summit may be running a day late, but we should probably be grateful a conversation between 195 world leaders about one of the world’s toughest issues is happening at all.

The U.N. climate change conferences have taken place annually since 1995 (the current installment is the 21st, hence the moniker COP 21), and what do we have to show for 20 years of work? A lot of promises, objectives and commitments to ... do more negotiations. Last year’s conference in Lima, Peru, laid a framework for leaders to put forward something concrete from this year’s conference in Paris. In theory, each nation has been diligently setting targets and taking action for the last year, and in Paris they had their time to shine: to explain what worked, what didn’t and what major infrastructure changes could realistically be accomplished to adapt to a changing climate.

If this were the case, the 27-page agreement that world leaders are drafting as we speak would offer a cure to climate change. Imagine the press release: "It’s over! We've solved it!"

If only it were so.

Some leaders have different ideas about what targets they are responsible for, and plan to achieve their own country’s targets to solve the global issue of climate change. Major disagreement centers on the responsibility for economic development in developing countries. A typical comment came from Brazil's environment minister, Izabella Teixeira, who said, “If you want to tackle climate change, you need ambition and political will. Brazil proudly supports the high ambition coalition.”

Here are some other views from developing-world ministers, from the Associated Press:

India's environment minister says wealthy nations are not showing enough flexibility at the climate talks.

Prakash Javadekar told reporters today that India wants a "just and equitable accord" that spares the world's poor from the "ill impacts" of climate change. "Unfortunately," he said, "the developing world is accommodating and the developed world is not accommodating and is not showing flexibility."

He said the disagreements are focused on "differentiation" — how to define the responsibilities of countries in different stages of economic development.

It's hardly shocking that divisions exist between the developed and the developing worlds, between products of the industrial revolution and those now trying to build a sustainable infrastructure. China is resisting emissions review, but Secretary-General Ben Ki-Moon and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius remain optimistic. Considering what still needs to get done to save humanity from an environmental catastrophe, they seem quite optimistic, according to Reuters:

Fraught discussions overnight exposed deep divisions on issues including a proposed goal to phase out net greenhouse gas emissions in the second half of the century.

Delegates said the talks were also split on who should pay for developing nations to move to low-carbon economies and to mitigate the effects of global warming on the climate, agriculture, human habitation and the earth's flora and fauna.

Despite the delay, many expressed hope the 195 nations meeting in Paris would grasp the strongest agreement yet to bind both rich and poor to curb rising greenhouse gas emissions at the climax of four years of negotiations.

"We are nearly there. I'm optimistic," Fabius told reporters in the early afternoon, flanked by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. "I'll present a text tomorrow at 0900 [Midnight Friday in California] to the parties that I'm sure will be adopted."

Ban called a 27-page draft text already on the table "a good basis" for a deal to help avert more powerful storms, droughts, and desertification and rising sea levels. "I appeal to all parties to take a final decision for humanity."

Let’s not pat ourselves on the back before it’s time, the biggest issues are still to come, in the form of climate justice, according to the BBC:

"This needs consensus," said Michael Jacobs, an economist with the New Climate Economy project. "There's a lot of negotiating to do."

"The really tough issues in the negotiation are still very much sitting there," warned New Zealand's Climate Change Ambassador, Jo Tyndall.

However, some campaigners were not happy with Thursday's draft, saying it denied "climate justice."

"Rich countries have a responsibility to ensure a fair global deal for everyone, not just themselves, and as we move into these final hours of negotiations poorer countries must not settle for anything less," said Adriano Campolina, from ActionAid.

Or perhaps, climate change is not an issue and negotiations to nail down common targets between developing and developed countries do not matter. While the public is struggling to cope with a heightened terrorist threat, all the talk about global warming is just a subterfuge for a developing-world effort to redistribute the wealth of the world's leading economies, argues Robert Owens of Red State:

“The way it looks now these leaders of the blind will be sitting in the middle of a snow storm debating how to slow man-made global warming .0001 degree by destroying modern civilization when the mushroom clouds of the Mullahs are rising over American cities.

All the Paris Summit is really about is passing a worldwide carbon tax. This tax is meant to penalize the West for creating the modern world and transfer the money to 3rd world tyrants who loot their own countries and are salivating at the chance to loot ours.

Most people aren’t worried about man-made global warming. They are concerned that some terrorist our anti-colonialist president is making us pay to fly over here will blow them up. Yet millions sit in front of the game dreaming that Norman Rockwell has painted their life when in reality it is Salvador Dali. The public schools we pay for are indoctrinating our own children to worship the religion of man-made global warming.”

Whatever negotiations and further discussion take place, be it climate justice between the developing and the developed worlds or a big carbon tax, an extra day for COP 21 will not be the be-all and end-all answer for how global leaders move forward in addressing climate change. Like the last 20 years, this 27-page draft is likely a set up for what comes next, not a solution or resolution.