1,000 little steps’: Global climate talks end in progress, but fail to address the galloping pace of climate change

KATOWICE, Poland — Weary climate negotiators limped across the finish line Saturday night after days of round-the-clock talks, striking a deal that keeps the world moving forward with plans to curb carbon emissions. But the agreement fell well short of the breakthrough that scientists — and many of the conference’s own participants — say is needed to avoid the cataclysmic impacts of a warming planet.

The deal struck Saturday at a global conference in the heart of Polish coal country, where some 25,000 delegates had gathered, adds legal flesh to the bones of the 2015 Paris agreement, setting the rules of the road for nearly 200 countries to cut their production of greenhouse gases and monitor each other’s progress.

Participants leaving town on Friday, even as negotiations
drag on at the end of the two-week United Nations
 summit on climate change in Katowice, Poland. 

While President Trump announced his intentions to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement, the Obama administration had already joined, and the text of the agreement doesn’t allow for formal withdrawal until late 2020. In the meantime, the U.S. remains involved in the negotiations and sends an annual delegation. It’s also still a part of the overarching climate treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, that’s the formal organizing structure for these yearly talks.

Read The Washington Post story by Brady Dennis, Griff Witte and Chris Mooney - “‘1,000 little steps’: Global climate talks end in progress, but fail to address the galloping pace of climate change.”