The Durban Debacle. Or, Durban Disaster. Or, ...

You pick your choice of alliteration. Jagdish Bhagwati calls it Deadlock in Durban.

First, the United States under Obama's ineffective leadership has drifted yet further into a "What's in it for me?" attitude on key issues requiring international action. In place of what the economist Charles Kindleberger once called an "altruistic hegemon", the US that the world now faces is what I call a "selfish hegemon".

The second problem is that the sheer weight of the US in international affairs, though diminished nowadays, has nonetheless led to a corruption of the principles that should underpin a new climate-change treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.

Ah, the US!  The "selfish hegemon" indeed!  

That is where the $100bn Global Climate Change Fund, promised at the Cancun COP-16 conference, comes in. Unfortunately, even environmental icons such as Al Gore in the US are so heavily invested in new green technology that their self-interest is tied up in this fund being spent on developing privately owned new technologies that are protected by patents.

The new "Green Revolution" seeds that the Nobel laureate agronomist Norman Borlaug developed with public money were freely available to all users anywhere. The technology developed by the money spent from the Global Climate Change Fund also should be equally available to all, including India and China, which would then enable them to agree to more emissions cuts.

Indeed, even the contributions to the fund should have reflected the past damage by the developed countries over the course of a century of carbon emissions - an obligation based on the well-established tort principle that the US has accepted for domestic pollution. But here, too, the US has rejected the idea outright.

I can't see the next elections making the US any more cooperative with the rest of the world.  Even if re-elected, we are looking at a lame-duck Obama with a divided Congress.  And with continued sluggishness in the economy, discussions on the global environment will not an agenda item even for the most insignificant subcommittee!

Naturally, the US position has not earned new friends:

The letter, signed by 16 different organisations and sent to the US Secretary of State, said that while President Barack Obama pledged in November 2008 to "engage vigorously in these negotiations, and help lead the world toward a new era of global co-operation on climate change," he had failed to deliver on that pledge.

Instead, the letter claimed, America is fast becoming seen as a "major obstacle" to progress.

Signatories included Greenpeace USA, the Natural Resources Defence Council, Oxfam America, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the World Wildlife Fund.

Shortly after it was made public, the European Union delegation at the summit criticised the US for "overlooking the facts" on the risk of climate change and suggested it was not doing enough at home to live up to its promises to cut carbon emissions.

Meanwhile, the ex-UN climate chief describes the talks as "rudderless:"

Yvo de Boer said he left his job as the U.N.'s top climate official in frustration 18 months ago, believing the process of negotiating a meaningful climate agreement was failing. His opinion hasn't changed.

"I still have the same view of the process that led me to leave the process," he told The Associated Press Sunday. "I'm still deeply concerned about where it's going, or rather where it's not going, about the lack of progress."

Ron Bailey calls it "Delusional in Durban"

The likelihood of draft proposals that require deep greenhouse gas emissions cuts by rich countries being adopted here in Durban is exactly nil.

 Dummies in Durban, eh!