Plastics Failure Is a Canary in the Climate Coalmine

You might have missed it amid the noise of the Trump transition and the sound of the European and Japanese auto industries collapsing. But the failure of an obscure United Nations meeting in South Korea at the weekend is a sign of how the entire edifice of environmental diplomacy is creaking.

The plastics meeting ended in disarray. The entire process began two years ago with a UN resolution titled “End Plastic Pollution,” but after hundreds of hours of discussions between more than 3,360 delegates, the thicket of qualifications and parentheses in the final text couldn’t even commit to the idea that “ending” plastic pollution was still a worthwhile goal. They’re going to have to hold another meeting in six months or so to complete the work that wasn’t done last week.

“We are still enmeshed in a sea of brackets, disagreements, misinformation, and obstructions perpetuated by a handful of countries,” wrote Aileen Lucero, a spokeswoman for the International Pollutants Elimination Network, a group that lobbies against hazardous chemicals.

Read the full story from Bloomberg Opinion.