The annual United Nations climate talks have opened in Durban, South Africa, with even lower expectations than last year’s ones did. This is reasonable: with most countries unwilling to do much new at home to deal with climate change, the global talks don’t seem to matter. Read more »

Here’s what I wrote the morning after the Cancun climate talks ended:

“There is one big hole in the Cancun agreement that many observers, in their excitement, appear to have quickly forgotten: its treatment of the Kyoto Protocol…. The Cancun result punts the dispute to next year’s talks…. The big challenge for next year’s talks will be to protect Cancun’s progress and momentum from the inevitable acrimony over Kyoto.” Read more »

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I asked Josh Busby, an Assistant Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, to write a guest post for this blog. Josh is conducting research on climate change in Kenya right now; in this post, he connects what he’s seeing on the ground to the climate talks in Cancun. Earlier this year, the CFR Program on International Institutions and Global Governance published his paper “After Copenhagen: Climate Governance and the Road Ahead“; he also wrote a study for us a couple years ago on climate change and national security. Read more »

This past April, when I launched this blog, my first public post was titled “Kyoto and Zombies”. As I sit at the Cancun climate talks writing my hundredth one, it’s hard not to marvel at how far we haven’t come. Read more »

Answer: Both don’t seem to understand that effective diplomacy requires some secrecy. Here’s what I mean.

Assange, the man behind WikiLeaks, seems to think that indiscriminately publishing hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables will somehow improve the world. I’m as opposed to counterproductive secrecy as much as the next guy, but by making private diplomacy much more difficult, WikiLeaks is undercutting efforts aimed at peaceful conflict resolution. As my former FAS colleague Steve Aftergood, a leading anti-secrecy crusader, wrote last week, “If [WikiLeaks] were anti-war, it would safeguard, not disrupt, the conduct of diplomatic communications.” Read more »

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India is one of the more inscrutable players on the global stage. Four years ago, when I was still spending most of my time thinking about nuclear security, I marveled at how much difficulty they had in accepting a U.S.-India nuclear deal that every non-Indian analyst thought was a gift to New Delhi. Last year, I watched in fascination as Jairam Ramesh, the Indian environment minister, floated a very forward-leaning approach to the international climate talks, only to get smacked down by the rest of the Indian establishment (and by some foreign partners). Given how Indian politics works, I suspected that that wasn’t the last we’d hear. Read more »

Why the Cancun Climate Talks Matter

The sixteenth annual UN climate negotiations kick off today in Cancun. I’ve got a couple pieces out this morning looking at different aspects of the talks, in the Wall Street Journal and at Slate. Read more »