One key argument necessary to have a good understanding of the international climate negotiations are the Total Emissions versus Per Capita Emissions debate.
Total Emissions versus Per Capita Emissions:
The developed world generally argues along the Total Emissions line of logic. In this argument, the parties that pollute the most total are primarily responsible for the climate change, and so they bear most of the responsibility for fixing the problem. Ever since China passed the U.S. in total CO2 emissions in 2008, this has been an argument that works its way into U.S. climate policies.
Many countries in the developing world argue along the Par Capita Emissions line. In this argument the countries which have the highest per capita emissions are more responsible for climate change. The countries with the highest per capita emissions (or, carbon footprints) are, by and large, the most developed countries. There is an implicit idea here that because we as a species share the atmosphere, then eventually we should roughly be polluting the same amount.
This debate gets into many wider ideas about how our leaders are approaching the climate problem. When the U.S. touts the total emissions argument and demands that China cuts its greenhouse gas emissions because they are the world's number one polluter, China might fire back that each one of their citizens polluted 4 times less than the average U.S. citizen, and that their citizens should have the right to pollute just as much as the citizens in the U.S.
For a visual of the total and per capita numbers, click here: http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/science/each-countrys-share-of-co2.html
These lines of argument are usually not so rigidly one-sided (China this, U.S. that), but they do crop up as major thematic points in the conference in the many policy debates going on in the conference. A big idea is that because the world economy is primarily driven by the combustion of carbon-based fuel, then in order to develop and grow economies and improve standards of living and pull people out of poverty, developing countries must produce more CO2 in order to develop. Developing countries believe that developed countries have no right to try to limit their CO2 emissions because that means essentially limiting their development and economic growth. Developed countries, on the other hand, are worried by the models that suggest if more people in the developing world do reach comparable levels of per capita emissions as they have in the developed world have, then very bad things will start to happen. Connected to all of these arguments are ideas about the links between prosperity and emissions, past emissions (huge for industrialized nations, not so huge for India or China) and future emissions (skyrocketing for India, China, and Brazil), and how to reasonably share the responsibility and liability of climate change.
Emerging from all this debating is the general consensus among most nations about the most fair thing to do. Developed countries must 1) reduce their own total and per capita emissions while 2) helping developed countries transition to more sustainable growth paths so that they will not have to pollute more to grow their economies and developed countries must also (3) aid developing countries in adapting to the effects of climate change that they had little to do in bring about. Reducing emissions in developed countries (1) means, among other things, investing in energy efficient infrastructure and in low carbon energy sources such as wind, solar, and biomass. Helping developed countries not pollute so much as they grow their economies (2) means making alternative clean technologies accessible and affordable to these countries through technology transfer and help financing the investments necessary for a lower-carbon economy as they grow. Aiding developing countries in adapting to the effects of climate change (3) means helping people cope with the specific effects of climate change. One specific example of this would be aiding a country in building a dike to keep the ocean from encroaching upon its land as sea-level rise occurs.
So, those are some international climate change basics for you, stated in a very general way to make it accessible. There is a lot more to it than this, of course, but this is one angle to approach understanding everything that will go on in Cancun. Debating specific points of the climate treaty (finance, REDD, technology transfer, mitigation, and adaptation) tends to be immensely complicated because any nation can weigh in on any point being set down into words. It is an immensely complicated and tedious process, but it is also the world's best hope to minimize the effects of climate change.
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