Cancun Talks Getting Underway

Hi delegates! Hopefully the fact that we are getting closer to the holidays is making up for the busy time of year.

So there has been a new news release by scientists during this initial week of the Cancun talks. Apparantly this year has been the warmest ever recorded worldwide. It will be interesting to see how this factors in to the arguements both for and against emission reductions in the near future. Do you think that this will put a damper on the arguments of any nations still against adopting policies for emission reductions?

As for the Cancun talks themselves, there has been looming expectations of its relative unimportance on the current radars of world governments, especially after the size and media coverage of the previous convention in Copenhagen. This time around, there will be next to no major heads of state representing their countries, and the results of the conference are expected to be lackluster at best, which is especially disconcerting considering the meagre outcomes of the much more prominant Copenhagen session. Moreover, as always the debate over the extent to which developing nations should be forced to regulate emissions is predicted to be a large point of contestion, as such nations argue that it is only fair that they be able to develop the same way that modern industrialized nations have already done in the past. This also raises the question of how developing countries can best try to reach their targets for emission reductions. Would it be more effective for industrialized countries to participate in technology transfer to enable cleaner-developing countries, or is their money and time better spent reducing emissions in the domestic markets of deceloped countries?