Why the UN can never stop climate change

On Sunday in Thailand diplomats opened another round of formal United Nations talks on global warming. For more than 20 years, the UN has been working on this problem, with little progress. Expectations have never been lower. The December 2009 conference in Copenhagen that was supposed to finalise a new treaty to replace the expiring Kyoto protocol ended in deadlock. Last year's talks in Cancún ended without agreement on most of the important new issues.

Some of the troubles with global warming diplomacy are unavoidable. Stopping climate change is one of the hardest challenges the international community has undertaken. The main cause of climate change, emissions of carbon dioxide, is intrinsic to the burning of fossil fuels that power the world economy. Even in the best of circumstances, getting off carbon will take decades and trillions of dollars. The world economic crisis makes that even harder as few societies choose to spend money on distant problems when they face more immediate challenges such as unemployment and poverty.

The failure to make progress, though, is mainly due to bad strategy. The United Nations forum is the wrong place for serious diplomacy. One of the chief strengths of the UN system – that it involves every nation on the planet – is a huge liability for global warming. By working in large groups, UN talks are often held hostage to the whims of even small players – as happened in Copenhagen and Cancún when Sudan and Bolivia and a few other nations whose emissions of warming pollution are tiny. The UN system has also relied on legally binding agreements, which sound good in theory yet have proved difficult to tailor and adjust in light of the many different interests that must be reflected in any serious international pact to control emissions. (read more)