Within days of the world reaching an agreement at the Durban climate conference on the extension of the Kyoto Protocol and framework for a new climate treaty, the efforts have suffered a major blow with Canada announcing its decision to pull out of the protocol. The decision of Canada to exercise its legal right to withdraw from the protocol has dealt a blow to the spirit of the Durban deal. An Indian official said Canada's decision could jeopardise any gains made at the Durban meeting. --India Today, 14 December 2011
Canada on Monday became the first country to formally renounce the protocol. Announcing the pullout, Canada's environment minister Peter Kent said Kyoto doesn't represent the way forward for Canada or the world. The decision to withdraw from Kyoto, Kent said, would save Canada $ 14 billion in penalties for not achieving its Kyoto targets. He said he would not be surprised if other countries follow Canada in pulling out of Kyoto. --India Today, 14 December 2011
Apart from hardcore greens and hardline hawks, India’s enviro minister Jayanti Nataraj is getting high marks from her countrymen as well as other developing nations for refusing to bow to EU pressure to commit to legally binding emission cuts. The Durban talks were saved from total collapse after India and China agreed to language that accomplishes the remarkable double feat of ensuring that the world will never do anything to avert climate “catastrophe”—while keeping alive the illusion that it will. --Shikha Dalmia, Reason Online, 13 December 2011
After two weeks of talks and partying, delegates at the UN climate summit in Durban agreed to meet again for further talks and partying around the dream of a global climate treaty. As expected, an informal coalition of major emitters such as the USA, China, India and Russia won the battle at the climate talks early on Sunday when they succeeded in delaying any binding decisions on CO2 emissions caps for years to come. Unless a manifest and continuous warming trend reappears by 2020, the green agenda will remain firmly on ice for the rest of this decade. --Benny Peiser, City A.M., 14 December 2011
The basic truth about Durban, the latest and 17th Feydeau farce passing as serious UN climate talks, is simple: the BASIC countries - Brazil, South Africa, India, and China - played a blinder. They outwitted comprehensively the ever-zealous, naive, and hypocritical EU to ensure that they achieved their fundamental goals, which were to delay any agreement on a replacement for the failing Kyoto Protocol until at least 2015, and any actual action to cut emissions until at least 2020. And, of course, by then, the plate tectonics of world politics may have altered even more radically, so that further delays will be eminently possible, or the global warming narrative - we can only hope - will have withered away permanently into perennial greenhouse history. --Philip Stott, The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 11 December 2011
Canada's withdrawal is also a timely reminder that, while negotiators at the Durban climate conference burned the midnight oil over the weekend to agree on a form of words that should lead to a legally binding deal to cut emissions after 2020, there is no guarantee countries won't walk away from their commitments later down the line.--Adam Vaughan, The Guardian 13 December 2011
Perhaps most concerning for future negotiations is the apparent erosion of the status of science as an arbiter of the reality of climate change and the basis for public policy decisions. Future agreements will no longer be based on the scientific advice of the IPCC but instead decisions will only be informed by the science. --Shawn Lawrence Otto, Minneapolis Post, 13 December 2011
How stupid am I? I’m cheered a little by a chat with Professor Steve Jones, a geneticist and Telegraph columnist. “I don’t understand any of it,” he says, cheerfully. “What the public doesn’t know is that most scientists don’t understand other scientists. A lot of physicists say that they don’t believe in evolution, which reminds me how little I know about physics.” –Iain Hollingshead, The Daily Telegraph, 13 December 2011
