The Duck of Minerva

The Real Climate Negotiations

by Charli Carpenter

13 January 2010, 1311 EST

Bill McKibben has a long interview on the public radio show Speaking of Faith, which you can listen to here. An insightful quote from the transcript:

The negotiation that’s underway, we think is between China and the U.S. and the EU. It’s really not; the real negotiation underway is between human beings on the one hand and physics and chemistry on the other. We’re going to have no choice but to adapt, whether it’s gracefully or in violent and ugly fashion to that demand of basic bottom line of the planet.

Food for thought as news of the devastation in Haiti from yesterday’s earthquake trickles out of Port-au-Prince this morning. For an easy way to help, see here.

Charli Carpenter is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is the author of 'Innocent Women and Children': Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (Ashgate, 2006), Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights
Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond (Columbia, 2010), and ‘Lost’ Causes: Agenda-Setting in Global Issue Networks and the Shaping of Human Security (Cornell, 2014). Her main research interests include national security ethics, the protection of civilians, the laws of war, global agenda-setting, gender and political violence, humanitarian affairs, the role of information technology in human security, and the gap between intentions and outcomes among advocates of human security.

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