This week a UN conference on climate change has convened to attempt to begin negotiations for a serious and far more effective follow-up to the Kyoto Treaty, to create the necessary agreements to mitigate and turn around the otherwise widely predicted catastrophic results of climate change, which could threaten life on earth. This year’s co-Nobel Peace Prize Winner, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has made clear the overwhelming scientific consensus that there is an unprecedented real and present danger that must be addressed by radical change immediately, world-wide. The largest impediments by far to progress have been the refusal of the big three largest polluters, the United States, which has been the single largest source of carbon emissions for many decades, and the rapidly emerging economies of China and India, which are becoming the largest cause of greenhouse gasses, to cooperate with meaningful change. In spite of more consensus than ever on the seriousness of the problem, with lip serve from the above and virtually all nations, the primordial forces of national economic and political power have trumped any serious attempt at real change, which it would appear clearly through experience must be mandatory, not voluntary, to have any chance of success. There has also been foot-dragging on helping the poor nations which both contribute to climate change because of unsustainable development practices and are most in need of economic and other assistance to change such practices without hurting the poor, but rather enabling them to achieve sustainable self sufficiency, as well as assisting them with coping with the impact of climate change, which is widely predicted to effect them most severely through hunger, drought, geological catastrophes and other calamities. Regardless of your opinion on the exact mechanisms needed, should the international community adopt strict policies that are required to reverse the trend of climate change ina sustainable manner, without consideration for anachronistic nationalist gain of one nation over another in a context which risks the survival of all, but which would mandate all nations to do what is needed with scientific consensus demonstrated by the IPCC on what is required in each context to reduce emissions and other pollutants causing climate catastrophe in a manner that equally impacts all nations in relative percentage of sharing the burden, taking into consideration both overall emissions and universal measures for all nations related to economic development status as it currently exists and as it changes in relationship to causes of emissions?