Climate Summit at Copenhagen: Negotiating the Intractable

摘要

Climate change is hugely challenging. But there is an unmistakable straightforwardness to it - reduce emissions to reduce global warming. In many ways, this reflects the sum total of the paradoxes that define our reality and the contradictions and hypocrisy of coping and dealing with it. Climate change raises all the right concerns from effectively all the right quarters. But concerns require actions and that is where the debate starts, the positions get entrenched and more often than not words and gestures become hollow and empty. The urgency to curb emissions is well understood by governments; acceptance of any defined limits is contested.