Receive our newsletter by typing your email address below. Munich, Germany - There's good news and bad news for the negotiators from around the world meeting in The Hague this week to finalize a climate change treaty. The good news is that climate science can no longer be denied, so momentum increasingly favors a strong treaty.
Research indicates that human activities, like fossil fuel combustion, are to blame.
More importantly, many global leaders now recognize this. The bad news, aside from the evidence that we face a big predicament, is that a rogue nation among the negotiators will be fighting to infuse the treaty with more holes than Swiss cheese. Rather than leading the world in fighting for a solution, America has used its negotiating muscle to push for wiggle room. That way its politically powerful coal-fired power plants can keep pumping out carbon. While the world's sole super-power dithers and balks at the technological challenge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, hundreds of miles away from The Hague, in his Munich office, Dr. Ralf M. Criens thinks he can slow the pace of climate change with a couple of crates of light bulbs, a stepladder, two day's labor, and the nod of a few Moscow bureaucrats.