The Other ‘Cliff’: The Kyoto protocol is about to expire and the two-week Doha Conference did little to avert the crisis
As Christmas approaches, the mercury here in Washington, D.C., has been flirting with 70 all month. On the day we decorated our Douglas fir, I went for a run in shorts, no shirt. The trees are skeletal, but songbirds still linger in the branches. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised—after all, November was the 333rd consecutive month of above-average global temperatures.
Halfway across the world, in Doha, Qatar, the latest international climate conference, COP18, just wrapped up. Representatives from some 190 countries spent a fortnight trying to lay the groundwork for a post-Kyoto world; the protocol expires at the end of this month, with a new agreement, based on the Durban Platform, set to take shape in 2015. Of course, whether the United States, the only country that failed to ratify Kyoto, will actually sign on to such a treaty is anyone’s guess. In Doha, the consensus among environmental activists and the European press—American coverage has been scant, natch—is that COP18 scarcely lived up to its low expectations.
Now is a good time to check in with what journalist Amy Goodman, writing in The Guardian, calls our “climate cliff.” With all the hand-wringing in Washington over the “fiscal cliff,” which is set to trigger $1.2 trillion in domestic and military spending cuts, it’s easy to forget that that same amount of money—$1.2 trillion—is already being lost each year, worldwide, due to climate change.