of climate change to the dangers of climate disruption. Extreme weather struck simultaneously around the world. Drought hit parts of the United States, torrential rains poured down on others, while the East Coast sweltered from unusually hot days that tried both tempers and the limits of the power system. Over Pakistan and western China, huge storms loosed massive flooding of a kind no one could remember. In Pakistan alone, this displaced 20 million people, all grasping for food, water, and shelter. Day after day large parts of Russia were burned by the sun. Temperatures were consistently over 100 degrees, and fires raged, creating storms of smoke that choked Moscow and turned Red Square, even from a few hundred feet away, into a ghostly silhouette. A third of Russia’s wheat crop was ruined, leading to a ban on grain exports and sending wheat prices spiking on the world market. “Our country has not experienced such a heat wave in the last 50 or 100 years,” said President Dmitry Medvedev. “Unfortunately, what is happening now... is evidence of the global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past. This means that we need to change the way we work, change the methods that we used in the past.”
“Everyone is talking about climate change now,” he added.
That included Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who had previously said that climate change would mean that Russians would need to buy fewer fur coats. On a visit to a scientific research station in northern Russia in August 2010, he said, “The climate is changing. This year we have come to understand this when we faced events that resulted in fires.” Nonetheless, Putin said he was still waiting for an answer to the question of whether climate change is the result of human activity or of “the Earth living its own life and breathing.”9
MAKING THE PLEDGE AT CANCÚN
After the disappointment and, to some, the debacle at Copenhagen, the next major meeting a year later at Cancún seemed to get climate regulations back on track. Yet what was described as the relative success of Cancún was a function, at least in part, of much lower expectations.
Some 193 nations signed on to the accord at Cancún, which offered—after a year of torturous negotiation—what the United States, the European Union, and the BASIC countries had agreed to in Copenhagen. A central element of the agreement was the adoption of specific pledges by countries for emissions reductions. The agreement also established a process of monitoring and verification. Under this system, mitigation efforts undertaken with domestic resources would be monitored domestically, while those taken with the help of international resources would be monitored internationally. To boost transparency of domestic actions, a system of international consultations and analysis every two years was agreed to. As part of it, information will be shared in an international forum that includes technical experts. Reconfirmation of the long-held goal of keeping temperature rises to within two degrees Celsius—though one regarded by many as overly optimistic—was another key element of the Cancún agreement.
But Cancún left much still up in the air. Most significantly, Cancún kicked down the road the question of whether to renew for another term the Kyoto Protocol, due to expire in 2012. While the sharp differentiation between the responsibilities of developed and developing countries set out in Kyoto was increasingly seen by developed countries as untenable, developing countries still generally hold fast to this concept. One possibility was to replace the Kyoto agreement with an agreement that was acceptable to both developed and developing countries. This would likely mean an agreement that does distinguish between the two groups in terms of historical emissions, but that acknowledges the reality that the largest emitters now come from both sets of countries, and that there should be a more equitable sharing of burdens. In short, much has to be done to shape a new framework.
IT’S UP TO THE EPA
For its part, the United States pledged under the Cancún agreement to reduce emissions by 17 percent by 2020 compared with 2005 levels. The likelihood of near-term legislative action ended when cap-and-trade stalled in the Senate. With the legislative avenue blocked, the Obama administration shifted from the carrot to the stick—or as some said, the bayonet—and pushed ahead with regulatory action. That meant that the action was with EPA. In 2009 the agency, bolstered by the 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision, issued an “endangerment” finding that greenhouse gas emissions threatened the public health