Heading into this month’s United Nations-sponsored climate negotiations, the world is contending with rising climate chaos and declining democracy.
It won’t be lost on any of the attendees in Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, that the talks are being hosted by an autocratic government whose economy relies almost entirely on the fossil fuels that are the primary driver of climate change.
As with so much at the United Nations, which is essentially a globe-spanning bureaucracy, the decision came down to protocol.
And that protocol, because of particular weaknesses within it, was easily manipulated by Russia, which is itself an autocratic petrostate.
By tradition, the U.N. climate summit is supposed to take place in a different part of the world each year.
Organizations:
United Nations, Eastern
Locations:
United, Baku, Russia, Soviet