Climate summit: Just another COP-out?

The two-week mega-summit on climate change underway in Paris is being billed as ‘The Mother of all COPs’: a last, best chance to save the planet from catastrophic climate change. But is it a turning point - or a prelude to disappointment?

Remember "Hopenhagen"?
The marketing team behind that upbeat slogan for the 2009 Copenhagen climate talks had the noblest of intentions: to shift the public debate on global warming from one of “coping” to “hoping”, that tangible action could be taken to keep carbon emissions at bay.
The rest, of course, is made-for-the-cynics history: the “COP15” Copenhagen talks collapsed in disarray – and the Danish capital instead became a byword for climate-summit calamity.
The organisers of the COP21 are hoping to avert another big letdown by making it
clear at the outset that a planet-salvaging breakthrough will not emerge at the end of the talks on December 11.
Instead, the talk is of a new beginning - starting points – for “ratcheting up” CO2 caps in the years and decades to come.
Still falling short
Rather than imposing carbon cuts by diktat, the new approach relies on voluntary “green” benchmarks from the 178 countries participating that represent approximately 90 percent of world’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
The world’s biggest polluters – the US and China – have stepped up with back-to-back commitments to rein in fossil fuels. However, the pledges still fall far short of what environmental activists say is needed to make a real difference. Recent new data, for instance, showed that China is burning up to 17% more coal a year than the... Go on reading on our web site.
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