Negotiating Climate Change
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2014
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Focussing on a very narrow set of countries, as we did in Kyoto, and looking for aggressive emissions cuts in the short term doesn’t do anything,” Robert Stavins, the director of the environmental economics program at the Harvard Kennedy School, says about the international conference on climate change taking place in Lima this week. Stavins joins the New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert and host Dorothy Wickenden on this week's Political Scene podcast to talk about the conference, which is the first of its kind since the 2009 conference in Copenhagen. They also discuss the recent United States-China agreement to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, the evolution of the Republican Party's pronouncements on environmental issues, and the fact that climate change remains a second-order issue to the American public. Of this, Kolbert says, “While I really think we have to applaud the administration for saying, ‘this is the best we can do in a bad situation,’ as a country we have to ask ourselves, ‘Really, is this the best we can do?’ ”
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| 1:16.2 | I'm Dorothy Wicenden, executive editor of The New Yorker. |
| 1:19.6 | Last month at the G20 conference in Brisbane, President Obama reiterated the urgent |
| 1:24.8 | need to take on climate change. |
| 1:26.6 | All countries, whether you are a developed country, a developing country, or somewhere in |
| 1:30.5 | between, you've got to be able to overcome old divides, look squarely at the science, |
| 1:37.0 | and reach a strong global climate agreement next year. |
| 1:40.2 | This week, representatives of 193 countries are convening in Lima for the first conference on global warming since Copenhagen in 2009. |
| 1:49.0 | This meeting comes after the release of a dire report from the UN saying that if by 2100, all greenhouse gas emissions don't fall to zero, the world will face, as they put it, severe, widespread and irreversible consequences. |
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