You might have missed it amid the noise of the Trump transition and the sound of the European and Japanese auto industries collapsing. But the failure of an obscure United Nations meeting in South Korea at the weekend is a sign of how the entire edifice of environmental diplomacy is creaking.
The meeting in the port city of Busan was intended to hammer out the text of a treaty to prevent plastic pollution, ahead of a planned summit to formalize the agreement next year. It would then join existing U.N. conventions on biodiversity and the ozone layer — along with by far the most well-known such institution, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC.
It’s common to treat these meetings as meaningless talking shops, but that’s not right. We have already measurably slowed global warming and prevented millions of cancer deaths thanks to the 1987 Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting chemicals. Policies enacted under the UNFCCC helped push carbon emissions about 12% below the direction they were headed in 15 years ago.
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