New
York Times: Delegates from 194 nations gathered today in
Durban, South Africa, for the opening of the
United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change. Topics to be discussed
include the differing obligations of industrialized and
developing nations, the question of who will pay to help poor
nations adapt, the urgency of protecting tropical forests, the
goal of reducing global carbon dioxide emissions by 2020, the
need to rapidly develop and deploy clean energy technology,
and, most important, the future of the Kyoto Protocol, writes
John Broder for the
New York Times. But political problems threaten to
derail the talks, according to Rajendra K. Pachauri, director
of the
Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change. Some of those problems can be blamed on the
US, which has not shown leadership on this issue,
said
Alden Meyer, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, to NPR's
Richard Harris. The Obama administration is hamstrung by the
current economic crisis and by Republicans' widespread denial
of human-induced climate change.
