As days race by and the December 11 deadline approaches, negotiators in Paris are frantically attempting to stitch together an agreement that will bring all 196 nations on board and stand the test of time. There has been no sign of hope emerging from the talks except for a little progress on the text, which has now been reduced form 55 pages to 50.
Most of India's concerns are still in the text, but G77 and China have thrown a spanner in the works, insisting that rich countries who are the largest contributors to global warming should bear a larger burden of cleaning up. The aim is to set up a $ 100 billion fund to help poor nations make technological changes that would reduce their carbon footprint. The rich nations which also backed out of the Kyoto talks, have a counter argument. They say the world has changed since the rich-nations-must-pay theory was first articulated. The rich few now want all developed nations to contribute to the fund and that would include India and China, who have agreed but through a different mechanism. Global warming is not selective and all nations will be effected if steps are not taken to reduce greenhouse gases and contain global warming to 2 degrees. Scientists say that the world is reaching the tipping point where global weather patters might be irreversibly impacted and beyond which it would make no sense to even talk about global warming. It's now or never.
