Why Is the Obama Administration in Cancun?
Brett Schaefer /
Last year at this time, the United Nations was coming to grips with the fact that the Copenhagen climate change summit would not produce a legally binding climate pact to succeed the failed Kyoto Protocol. In retrospect, nearly everyone acknowledges that the Copenhagen conference failed utterly to achieve its objectives. A year later, nations are again huddled together at a U.N. conference—this time in sunny Cancun, Mexico, rather than blustery Denmark—to try to get the global warming treaty train back on the rails.
In the lead up to the Copenhagen conference, I wrote an article questioning the central role played by the U.N. in setting the tone and direction for global warming negotiations because that organization had moved from a position of “neutral broker” to that of a clearly biased party. By consenting to negotiate a global warming agreement through the U.N., the U.S. placed its negotiators in a position of weakness. Nations with little direct stake in the outcome of negotiations as well as U.N. officials manipulated the process to focus on an ineffective, costly agreement that unduly burdened the U.S. and other developed countries without any real assurance that such sacrifices would address the issue of global warming. (more…)