Did you hear about the other big political showdown last week, far from Florida, that bears on the fate of the earth even more than who the next American president is? The UN global warming conference at the Hague fell apart after 11 days of negotiations failed to resolve the central disputes between European and American negotiators. It might have reminded you more of a Middle East summit. The Europeans blamed the Americans. The Americans blamed the Europeans and the whole thing collapsed dramatically in the middle of the night over the question of whether big industrial countries like the US could apply their abundance of trees as a kind of special discount on reducing fossil fuels.
The game was to get 170 countries to agree to the Kyoto climate treaty, but the only thing anyone could agree at the Hague last week is that the world is heating up. Who killed Kyoto, this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
William Moomaw, Professor of International Environmental Policy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University
and Bill McKibben, author of “The End of Nature” and “Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously”, and writer for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harpers.