International climate-change meeting opens in South Africa

New York Times : Delegates from 194 nations gathered today in Durban, South Africa, for the opening of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change . Topics to be discussed include the differing obligations of industrialized and developing nations, the question of who will pay to help poor nations adapt, the urgency of protecting tropical forests, the goal of reducing global carbon dioxide emissions by 2020, the need to rapidly develop and deploy clean energy technology, and, most important, the future of the Kyoto Protocol, writes John Broder for the New York Times. But political problems threaten to derail the talks, according to Rajendra K. Pachauri, director of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change . Some of those problems can be blamed on the US, which has not shown leadership on this issue, said Alden Meyer , of the Union of Concerned Scientists, to NPR’s Richard Harris. The Obama administration is hamstrung by the current economic crisis and by Republicans’ widespread denial of human-induced climate change.