Protected: UN Climate Negotiation History 101

by Katie O'Brien As Earth in Brackets prepares its delegation for Warsaw we have been reviewing and learning more about the history of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). So I thought it’d be good to share our notes and knowledge with our audience so maybe you can better understand what we’re talking about in COP19. 1992 The Rio Earth Summit happens – you may have seen...

Industrial agriculture ought to move away: agroecology is the only safe option

by Maria It is pretty clear that the planet is increasingly warming up as we keep emitting carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and extracting natural gas from the ground. Or at least it is pretty clear to more than half the world’s population who in recent decades have been dealing with periods of abnormal rainfall, intense floods and droughts, heat waves, and loss of biodiversity. While...

When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose

by nathan thanki It is the sometimes orthodoxy that any deal is better than no deal, that by degrees we can overcome the climate crisis. It is "common sense" that you take what you can get and live to fight another day. But all this piecemeal haggling simply moves us, degree Celsius by degree Celsius, toward an unlivable and somehow even more unjust world. Let's have a new...

From Crevice to Chasm

By Julian Velez Developed countries are trying to undermine the relevance of the Bali Road Map as a whole, as well as the Durban Package laid out last year. These include a 2nd commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol (KP), and comparable mitigation actions by developed countries for non-KP parties under the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long Term Cooperative Action (AWG-LCA) and Nationally Appropriate...

[earth] plans an outing

on a lighter note...  real life email thread  straight from Doha... where the weekend approaches. and we don't know how to react.  (photo cred: Cam Fenton) Chair's text:  Salaams, As Minister of Fun Times, I give you a brief update from home base. Down-time: Suben informs me that there is a town built for the movie 'Transformers', an epic tale of love and machinery starring Shaia LeBeef, a...