US dictates the limits of Paris climate change deal
If there was one overarching imprint on the Paris climate change negotiations, it was of the diplomatic heft that the US enjoys. The last hours of the talks, when the US was faced with the challenge of removing a phrase it didn’t like in the final agreement, it was left to the European Union to walk across the aisle to convince everyone to not oppose the changes the US demanded. The European Union, once hailed as the climate change leader of the world, was canvassing the developing country bloc to accept an agreement that was discordantly against its own non-negotiable position wanting a strict legally-binding protocol and not a loosely-bound agreement that the Paris outcome eventually became. That is a mere cherry of an anecdote that the Malaysian negotiator and the chief spokesperson of the Like-Minded Developing Countries group, Gurdial Singh Nijar, revealed in a candid interview to the Third World Network, an observer group at the negotiations. The US imprint is mo...