Last-minute surprise deal in Durban to save Kyoto

Chaos may be erupting at home in the European Union, but in South Africa news came this morning that the EU has scored a surprising success in international climate talks. A binding roadmap for a globally binding agreement by 2015, which the EU had demanded in exchange for continuing the existing commitments of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, was signed this morning by all greenhouse gas emitters – including the US and China. It is the first time all major emitters have agreed, in principle at least, to binding emissions reductions.

It was truly surprising news. As of Friday (the day the talks were supposed to end) it looked like they were going to collapse in failure. Though the EU had been able to convince Brazil and South Africa to sign the roadmap, the US, China and India were still refusing. There was fear that Durban would end with no deal, which would mean the end of any internationally binding emission reduction commitments. It would have essentially taken climate talks back to 1995 and made a mockery of the UN process.

The US and China did not participate in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which committed nations to binding emissions reductions by 2013. The Clinton Administration signed the Kyoto Protocol, but by the time it came up for ratification in the US the George W. Bush administration had taken over - and they refused to ratify it. They said they would not participate in a binding protocol that did not include China, now the US’s biggest competitor.

London's statue status

Yesterday a statue of Nelson Mandela went up in Parliament Square, and it got me thinking. In a city with more statues than dentists, at what point do we start reevaluating the ones that are already here?

I mean logic would tell you that, on a practical level, if this city keeps putting up statues at the rate it has been they’ll be no room left in the public parks for anyone to walk around. But on a more sentimental level, one has to note that the kinds of people we’re chiseling into stone today are quite different from the people we immortalized a century ago.

Take the new Mandela statue for instance. When I went to visit it last night I saw that it faces a statue of Jan Smuts, who was the South African prime minister at the inception of white rule. Winston Churchill, perhaps the most well-known statue in the square today, helped to draw up the du-jour segregation plan at the outset of South Africa’s independence.