The border patrol is threatening two endangered cats in Texas. As the worm turns , by Erik Ness. Industry is talking about climate change. Sign up to get free environmental news updates by email. If you walk straight out the front door of this convention hall and skirt the sandbagged dike that activists built during a weekend demonstration, you find yourself at the front door of a squat building with a U.N. flag flying from a pole.
Demonstrators build a dike while they wait for a change of tide.
At any given moment, two or three different courtrooms are in session. What the Kyoto Protocol really represents is an attempt to convince nations to accept meaningful limits on their sovereignty over their economies. And the reason why the U.S. inevitably emerges as the villain in these talks, the one holding back every agreement, is that absolute sovereignty has done more for us than it's done for anyone else, and so we are reluctant to let it go. French President Jacques Chirac spoke to the convention on Monday, and for the most part reporters concentrated on his blistering attack on U.S. energy use. Jacques Chirac rocks the boat.