The basic truth about Durban, the latest and 17th Feydeau farce passing as serious UN climate talks, is simple: the BASIC countries - Brazil, South Africa, India, and China - played a blinder. They outwitted comprehensively the ever-zealous, naive, and hypocritical EU to ensure that they achieved their fundamental goals, which were to delay any agreement on a replacement for the failing Kyoto Protocol until at least 2015, and any actual action to cut emissions until at least 2020. And, of course, by then, the plate tectonics of world politics may have altered even more radically, so that further delays will be eminently possible, or the global warming narrative - we can only hope - will have withered away permanently into perennial greenhouse history. More here
