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Despite all the recent activity regarding climate change running the gamut from breakthrough
legislation in California regarding groundwater protection to huge protest marches many
experts concur that international talks wont be a decisive factor in climate change policy. A
gathering of world leaders at the United Nations in September 2014 for an international summit
on climate thats meant to kick off 15 months of negotiations aimed at finalizing a climate
change agreement in December 2015. In an article in Forbes Magazine, Michael Levi, a senior
fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations warns:
Climate change has long been approached as the ultimate foreign policy problem. Greenhouse
gas emissions anywhere raise temperatures everywhere. What that means for climate policy is
that emissions cuts anywhere curb global warming everywhere. Since cutting emissions usually
costs money, it makes sense for each country to ask other countries to act while trying to do as
little as possible themselves: that way, they keep their costs to a minimum, but still benefit from
reduced climate change because of what others have done. The danger is that if every country
adopts this attitude, no one will do much of anything. The only way out of this beggar-thyneighbor quagmire, strategists have long assumed, is for countries to reach a legally binding pact
in which they all curb greenhouse gas emissions at the same time.
The Boston Globes Robert N. Stavins has a different take on what the end result of the
international summit on climate change might be. In a September 23, 2014 article Stavins paints
a more optimistic picture when he writes:
The goal now before negotiators is to produce a new international agreement under the
Durban Platform in Paris in 2015, for implementation in 2020, as a successor to the Kyoto
Protocol. This presents the greatest opportunity the world has had in 20 years to make
meaningful progress on this exceptionally challenging issue. The UN summit in New York can
accelerate the momentum toward such a new, path-breaking approach.