Greenspan Bell: “To some extent the U.N. negotiations have been a kind of ‘Groundhog Day’ – the famous movie where Bill Murray woke up every morning and lived exactly the same life every day – an endless kind of yearly cycle coming mostly to the same point – which is an agreement to continue to negotiate.”
That’s Ruth Greenspan Bell, a public policy scholar at the Wilson Center. She says climate delegates in Paris could break the cycle with a successful strategy used by the negotiators of the Iran nuclear deal.
Greenspan Bell: “Rather than take on every irritant between the U.S. and Iran and the world, they narrowed down to one extremely pressing issue.”
Bell says there’s an advantage to this approach.
Greenspan Bell: “It’s really defeating the notion that nothing can be resolved unless everything is resolved. So as long as we’re stuck in that loop, the entire enterprise is imbued with a real sense of hopelessness.”
Lessons from nuclear arms talks for #ClimateChange decisionmakers. Click To TweetPrioritizing the issues and focusing on the most pressing ones can help. For example, just eleven countries emit 70 percent of all carbon pollution, so Bell says if the Paris climate talks lead to an agreement to reduce emissions among the world’s biggest polluters, that would be a policy win for everyone.
Reporting credit: ChavoBart Digital Media.
Photos: Change/same graphic (copyright protected). Groundhog Day movie image (Wikipedia).
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