Are the climate change talks still useful?

Without much attention, the unwieldy process of climate change diplomacy continues. Over at UN Dispatch, Corbin Hiar files a gloomy report on the latest round of talks: Since the outcome of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change summit in Copenhagen failed to meet the sky high hopes environmentalists had placed in it, international negotiators ...

By , a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

Without much attention, the unwieldy process of climate change diplomacy continues. Over at UN Dispatch, Corbin Hiar files a gloomy report on the latest round of talks:

Without much attention, the unwieldy process of climate change diplomacy continues. Over at UN Dispatch, Corbin Hiar files a gloomy report on the latest round of talks:

Since the outcome of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change summit in Copenhagen failed to meet the sky high hopes environmentalists had placed in it, international negotiators have been working hard ever since to lower expectations. Gone is talk of quickly crafting an binding successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, which effectively expires in 2012. Diplomats have given up on a firm agreement until the 2011 summit in South Africa and are instead trying to do what is “politically possible.”

Yet even with those diminished goals, the six-day Tianjin climate talks, which concluded this weekend, made so little progress that some diplomats openly wondered whether continuing the UNFCCC process was even politically worthwhile.

David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist

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