Rich-Poor Rift Persists Over Climate

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The idea, through two weeks of climate negotiations that ended Saturday, was to find new ways to craft a common, global approach to avoid overloading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and forests. So far, every such effort has faltered or proved a dead end — from the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Elizabeth Rosenthal, who covered the talks, sent in a final dispatch over the weekend once the last prolonged plenary session concluded. Her note, posted below, illustrates the deep “climate divide” that persists. On one side are the world’s industrialized nations, which largely built their wealth through a century of fossil-fuel combustion; on the other, those seeking a path out of poverty that, for the moment, has to depend on the same energy sources, and in many cases also on clearing forests. Many experts on the talks see little likelihood of a full-blown, completed treaty a year from now in Copenhagen, in part because the incoming Obama administration must shape its approach around the concerns of the Senate (where a two-thirds vote must consent to United States treaty participation). And Congress remains divided over climate steps not just by party, but by geography, with states rich in coal or clinging to industries reliant on oil most resistant to change....