The History of Climate Change Negotiations in 83 seconds

This Youtube video by CICERO, the Oslo-based Center for International Climate and Environmental Research, is released under a Creative Commons licence. Feel free to share it.

See also Wikipedia's summary of climate negotiations 1992-2012 and NGO reactions to COP-18. Third World Network Doha bulletins, esp. number 23. Canadian NGOs' report.

Veteran observer Michael Dorsey's 8 Dec 2012 email from Doha says, "They're calling it an "EU Bridge"... it's a bridge, for sure, but over the river Styx!

• An extraordinarily weak cock up on climate finance, failing to put money on the table or to ensure a pathway to the $100 billion a year by 2020 target.

• An eight year second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol with loopholes that allow carry-over, use and trading of hot air.. [to save the EU ETS carbon market, with its built-in licenses to pollute - Ed.].

• A call – though not an official ambition ratchet mechanism - for Kyoto Protocol countries to review their emissions reduction target inline with the 25-40% range by 2014 at the latest. 

The only hopeful element, ever so slightly:

• An agreed work program on loss and damage to help victims of climate change will start immediately and a decision “to establish institutional arrangement, such as an international mechanism , at COP19”.[I suspect this is the New Market Mechanism. See my NMM compilation  - Ed] Also Financial Times, Doha talks agree to climate compensation and Reuters Point Carbon,  Key decisions at Doha.

["Hot air" credits in the EU-ETS (shown in yellow in the graph below) were assigned to former Soviet bloc countries that fell below their BAU curve due to political and economic collapse in the 1990s. A boondoggle for carbon brokers and corrupt elites. They do not represent any real emission cuts. -- Ed.]

source: UK Guardian