The annual United Nations climate change negotiations this year in Doha, which wrapped up on December 8, seemed weirdly tame and dispirited. There was minimal press coverage and, as Jennifer Haverkamp of the Environmental Defence Fund observed, there were “no people in polar bear suits, no passionate youth doing skits, no melting ice sculptures — no real infusion of energy.”

There was also no solid agreement on how to confront the threat of global warming by slowing the seemingly inexorable rise of heat-trapping emissions or by helping poor nations mitigate the inevitable damage or, preferably, both.

READ: Doha’s ‘incredibly weak’ deal on funds, emissions

That was not weird. These conferences have not produced a binding document since the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which was itself flawed because it asked nothing of big developing nations, and, partly for that reason, was never ratified by the United States Congress.

Forcing the poor to pay the price

If one looked hard enough, however, one could find some encouraging notes. For one thing, the usually strident anti-Western (and especially anti-US) finger-pointing was muted this time.

Granted, Friends of the Earth International accused the “rich industrialised world, most notably the US,” of “paralysing the talks and forcing the world’s poor to pay the price”, and some of the left-leaning British press said much the same.

But it all seemed rather perfunctory, and for good reason: Many Western nations, including the US, are doing a decent (though by no means sufficient) job of reducing emissions. It’s countries like China and India, and the oil-producing nations of the Middle East, that are doing a terrible job.

Copenhagen talks
At the Copenhagen meeting three years ago, the European Union pledged to reduce emissions by 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020. It is on track to meet and possibly exceed that goal.

For his part, President Obama committed the United States to a reduction of 17 per cent below 2005 levels, as called for in a Bill that had passed the House but was later blocked in the Senate.

For all sorts of reasons — including the recession, improved automobile efficiency, the increased use of natural gas instead of coal, and more efficient vehicles and appliances — the country is already more than halfway there.

Meanwhile, though, China’s and India’s emissions are soaring. China’s emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, have tripled since 1990. India’s nearly so. Moreover, the two countries reportedly plan to build more than 800 new coal-fired power plants, three quarters of the world’s total, locking in huge new emissions for decades.

With trajectories like these, there is no way the world can prevent global temperatures from rising beyond the threshold (two degrees Centigrade above pre-industrial levels) that mainstream scientists regard as the upper limit of safety.

New treaty

A year ago, in Durban, climate negotiators agreed to draw up a new treaty by 2015 to replace Kyoto. The Doha negotiators ratified that schedule, and reaffirmed that this time around it would require detailed commitments from the developing as well as the developed countries.

As a blogger for Greenpeace wrote, after taking the obligatory shots at the US delegation, “It is time for the emerging nations such as China, India South Africa and Brazil to step up and take a more progressive role in constructing a 2015 global climate deal, as well as reducing domestic emissions.”

Robert B. Semple, Jr., a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the associate editor of The New York Times editorial page