Three dozen climate negotiators and scientists were at Lincoln Center the other day, in the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre, to see a performance of "Kyoto," about the landmark 1997 treaty on greenhouse-gas emissions. It was a bittersweet reunion for "Team Climate U.S.A.," as Sue Biniaz, a State Department lawyer for more than thirty years, put it, while addressing the group in the lobby after the show.
Supporters of a global phaseout of fossil fuels must find creative ways to keep the proposal alive, including making it voluntary rather than binding, the UK energy secretary, Ed Miliband, has said in the closing stages of the UN climate talks. As the Cop30 summit in Brazil carried on past the Friday night deadline, the prospect of countries agreeing on the need for a roadmap to a global transition away from fossil fuels looked increasingly dim. A first draft of the potential outcome text from the summit had contained the formulation, but in the updated draft text produced on Friday by the Brazilian presidency it had been excised.
From one perspective, Australia's long running bid to host the Cop31 UN climate conference next year has ended in clear failure. It campaigned for more than three years for the rights to put on the world's biggest climate summit and green trade fair, which would have brought tens of thousands of people to the South Australian capital of Adelaide next November.
Somehow the reduction in enthusiasm of the global north is showing that the global south is moving, Correa do Lago told reporters in Belem, the city in the Amazonian rainforest where the fortnight-long Cop30 conference is taking place. It is not just this year, it has been moving for years, but it did not have the exposure that it has now.
