Global-warming talks set for 194 nations

Associated Press

NEW YORK

The last time the world warmed, 120,000 years ago, the Cancun coastline was swamped by a 7-foot rise in sea level in a few decades. A week from now at that Mexican resort, frustrated negotiators will try again to head off a new global deluge.

The disappointment of Copenhagen — the failure of the annual U.N. conference to produce a climate agreement last year in the Danish capital — has raised doubts about whether the long-running, 194-nation talks can ever agree on a legally binding treaty for reining in global warming.

Even the Mexican hosts of the Nov. 29-Dec. 10 U.N. conference question whether “it is the best way to work — with 194 countries,” as Mexico’s environment secretary, Juan Rafael Elvira Quesada, put it.

The core failure has been in finding a consensus formula for mandatory reductions in countries’ emissions of carbon dioxide and other global-warming gases, byproducts of power plants, other industries, agriculture and automobiles.

For 13 years, the United States has refused to join the rest of the industrialized world in the Kyoto Protocol, a binding pact to curb fossil-fuel emissions by modest amounts. More recently, as China, India and other emerging economies exempted from the 1997 Kyoto pact have sharply increased emissions, they have rejected calls by the U.S. and others to commit by treaty to restraints.

No one expects Cancun to resolve that standoff. Instead, delegates will focus on climate financial aid, deforestation and other secondary “building blocks” to try to revive momentum toward an umbrella deal at next year’s conference in South Africa or at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 2012.