Climate Change Negotiations: The Death of the Kyoto Process - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

There seems little possibility that next month's climate summit in Durban will produce an emissions reduction agreement -- meaning the world will soon lack any binding CO2 targets. Europe may soon find itself alone in the fight against global warming.

A climate catastrophe descended on the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin early last week...."The meeting in Durban could become an act of mourning," warns Reimund Schwarze of the Climate Service Center in Hamburg, which analyzes climate policy on behalf of the German government.
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Although the industrialized countries will achieve the goal set in 1997, Merkel, now Germany's chancellor, has lost almost all the optimism she had at the time. In fact, she now warns that the international negotiations could turn into a "huge disappointment."
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The Kyoto Protocol was never ratified in the United States, and the country remains unwilling to submit to international commitments on energy consumption out of a concern that doing so could cost jobs. "Clean energy has become a dirty word in the United States," a close advisor to US President Barack Obama said during a recent visit to Berlin.
...it is likely that in the coming decades global warming will exceed the 2 degrees Celsius defined by the UN as the threshold to a dangerously overheated world.
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Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg and chairman of the German Climate Consortium, believes that global climate policy has reached a low point and that both politicians and the public are losing interest in climate issues. "But we can't negotiate against the climate," Marotzke warns.