So Much For "Hopenhagen"
World leaders give up on signing a climate-change treaty at the COP 15 talks next month Over the weekend President Obama and other world leaders broke the news: No legally binding international climate-change treaty this year. In the past few weeks it had become clear that sorting through the many unresolved issues (the level of greenhouse-gas cuts that each nation would commit to, the amount of aid that rich nations would give the developing world to ease their transition into a clean-energy economy) would take longer than a matter of weeks. Then there’s the fact that the United States has yet to pass climate-change legislation of its own, which could be the biggest obstacle of all. The rest of the world is waiting to see what the US brings to the table before committing to cuts, and with health care and the financial crisis tying up Congress, there is now no...