After Cancun: The Impossibility of Carbon Trading‪.‬

I INTRODUCTION Described as a passage 'From Hopenhagen to Fiascohagen in 12 dire days' by Mr Jonathan Porritt, one of the UK's most prominent environmental activists, (1) the UN Climate Change Conference held in Copenhagen between 7-18 December 2009 (COP15) (2) is widely held to have been a failure. The Conference would have ended entirely without agreement had not a self-selecting group of five countries (3) acted outside agreed COP15 negotiating procedures, indeed initially without UN involvement at all, to produce The Copenhagen Accord (CA), (4) a very general document of no legal status (5) to which no country, certainly not those which initially produced it, has made a significant commitment. After the experience of COP15, the recently concluded COP16, held at Cancun, Mexico between 29 November and 10 December 2010, was conducted in a chastened atmosphere of much reduced expectation, and it has lived down to that expectation. As will be discussed below, (6) its principal Draft Decision is a remarkable contrast of bombastic expression of good intentions with a complete failure to give any practical effect to those intentions, a bathetic conclusion to more than 18 years of climate change negotiations since the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was agreed in 1992 (7).