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The worlds' powers met again recently in Durban, South Africa, and tried to hash out a deal to curb greenhouse gases that are changing (i.e. warming up) our environment. How did they do? The folks over at Greenbiz.com tried to get their hands around it:

The so-called Durban platform is a promise to negotiate a new climate deal by 2015 to replace the Kyoto protocol and take effect in 2020. It's a commitment to "a process to develop a protocol, another legal instrument or an outcome with legal force under the Convention applicable to all Parties." (If this doesn't strike you as faintly ridiculous, you've been spending too much time at the UN.)

In essence, all the parties agreed to sit down during the next session and actually hammer out a legally-binding document that all polluters would be beholden to. But is that going to happen, and should they just be focused on reducing emissions --- or setting new policies?

Negotiations that focus on setting targets for emissions are unlikely to succeed, if only because the levels of emissions reflect forces -- economic growth, fuel costs, technology breakthroughs (or their absence) -- over which governments have limited control.

Instead of agreeing to numerical emissions targets, governments could pledge to adopt "greener" policies. They could, for example, set efficiency standards for buildings or cars, or impose a carbon tax."Especially when it comes to countries that are growing rapidly, it's much easier for them to make promises about policies and measures than about emissions outputs," says David Victor, director of UCSD's Laboratory on International Law & Regulation.

Well, there are some optimists:

To be sure, as the optimists argue, this is the first time that the governments of countries that are the biggest carbon emitters -- China, the United States, the EU and India -- have agreed to negotiate legally binding restrictions. That's a big change from the terms of the Kyoto protocol, which essentially excluded developing countries, among them China, the world's biggest carbon emitter.

Fingers are crossed but breath is not held. There is a long way to go on this thing, that's for sure.

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