By Hannah Chang The term “legally binding” has become a touchstone of sorts in international climate policy. The Copenhagen Accord taken note of by the fifteenth Conference of Parties (COP) under the United National Framework Convention on Climate Change in December 2009 is not legally binding. Heads of state and […]
International
279 posts
My last blog was written shortly after midnight on Thursday. Here are my observations concerning Friday and Saturday. Friday was a day of high drama and muddled results. As the workday began (and many committees were continuing their sleepless drafting, amid a backdrop of radically fluctuating expectations that by turns […]
As I write this a little after midnight on Thursday, less than 24 hours remain before the nominal close of the Copenhagen talks. And local television is playing continuous loops of an English-language TV movie (with Danish subtitles) about an evil oil company that is trying to sabotage the “Kyoto […]
The formal negotiations are taking place in only one place, the Bella Center, but throughout the city of Copenhagen the climate event cannot be missed. Numerous buildings are draped with huge signs proclaiming some company’s, nation’s, or group’s contributions to reducing the climate problem. Public plazas have large displays of […]
Difficult as it is to discuss global warming in the midst of a snowstorm (such as Copenhagen is experiencing right now), discussions proceed on multiple tracks, though “tracks” implies more linearity and parallelism than actually exists. The hidden elephant (or polar bear) in many of the rooms is the United […]
There are many shows taking place in Copenhagen right now. Where the real action is, however, is another question entirely. Over the weekend a mass demonstration — estimates of the number of participants range from 30,000 to 100,000 — took over parts of the city, leading to nearly 1,000 arrests. […]
Any international agreement reached in Copenhagen can truly be binding on the U.S. only if it is incorporated into domestic law. A treaty is the law of the land, but under Article II of the Constitution, a treaty must be ratified by two-thirds of the Senate. Hard as it is […]