The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Lima, Peru, this week and next will lay the groundwork for a more significant gathering in Paris a year from now: the 21st conference of the 1992 United Nations Convention on Climate Change. The third such conference, in 1997, produced the Kyoto Protocol, the much-heralded but ineffective plan to cut greenhouse-gas emissions without applying to developing nations. The 15th conference, held in Copenhagen five years ago to draw up a successor treaty, collapsed spectacularly under determined opposition from China and India.
The Paris conference, also intended to bring about an agreement covering all the world’s emitters, promises to be different—if only in the way it influences the next U.S. presidential election.
The Obama administration drew two lessons from Copenhagen. First, that the key to getting a global climate deal in Paris would be to secure first a bilateral one with China. Second, that seeking a binding treaty is overambitious and unnecessary. An accord that doesn’t require Senate approval would suffice. America’s international commitments could be implemented by executive actions.
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