Quote of the Day: the Durban Climate Agreement

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


From Kate Sheppard, explaining how the Durban climate conference managed to avoid catastrophe and forge a last-minute agreement:

In the end, it came down to a single turn of phrase: changing “legal outcome” in the earlier draft to “an agreed outcome with legal force under the convention applicable to all parties.”

Whatever it takes, I guess. In the end, the Durbanites agreed to “launch a process to develop a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force.” So that’s that. A process will be started. The outcome will be a protocol, or maybe a legal instrument, or maybe an agreed outcome with legal force. Hopefully this outcome will happen by 2015. And then everyone will sign on by 2020.

This doesn’t strike me as an especially cheering result, but, as usual, it’s better than a complete meltdown, I suppose. For more details, Michael Levi has a fairly discouraging take here (“It is distressing to see how much attention has become devoted to form rather than function”) while David Roberts has a slightly more upbeat take here (the agreement may be mostly symbolic, but it’s also “a marker and a serious concession”).

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate