MR. KOJO NNAMDIFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your neighborhood with the world. Later in the broadcast, it's the dream of many foreign born students in the U.S., not just to build better lives for themselves, but to improve the lives of people back home. But first, last year's global climate change talks in Copenhagen raised a lot of hype and hope with heads of state adding to the pressure to come up with an agreement and many developing countries objecting to a deal negotiated by a handful of wealthy countries behind closed doors.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIThe result was more than disappointing. Some called it a train wreck. So it might be a good thing that this year's climate talks in Cancun, Mexico, have barely been a blip on the meteor radar screen. More limited goals and less of a spotlight may have been just what was needed for progress and the final agreement with small, but important steps forward. Joining us to discuss this is Nathan Hultman. He's a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution. He's also the associate director for the Joint Global Change Research Institute at the Pacific Northwest Laboratory. Nathan Hultman, thank you for joining us.

MR. NATHAN HULTMANThanks for having me on.

NNAMDIExpectations were low for Cancun. On the other hand, expectations may have been too high for Copenhagen. Maybe less of a spotlight was better?

HULTMANIt appears that was at least a factor in helping relax the expectation and maybe get to some better kind of an agreement in Cancun. In your initial comments, yes, the Copenhagen meeting was full hype and tremendous pressure, not only for the heads of state, but also for the negotiators. The eyes of the world were on the negotiations in Copenhagen and everybody was concerned that they would make a mistake.

HULTMANAnd I think in that sense it was set up in some ways to fail on that dimension. Cancun was in full contrast. There were very low expectations. As you mentioned, very little international attention was being paid to the Cancun negotiations and the agenda was fairly simple. It was essentially to get the process back on track, to start looking for a way that countries could come back together to maybe negotiate a treaty that would replace the Kyoto Protocol. But for this meeting, really there were a number of essentially issues of moderate importance that were on the table.

NNAMDINate was in Copenhagen, also at six other talks going back to Kyoto. You can join this conversation by calling 800-433-8850. Have you been following the climate talks in Cancun? What do you think prospects are for global cooperation on climate change? 800-433-8850 or make a comment, ask a question at our website, kojoshow.org. Nate, remind us of what was agreed to in Copenhagen and what progress has been made in the year or so since then?

HULTMANWell, at Copenhagen, we ended up with an agreement called the Copenhagen Accord. And that was negotiated by our President Obama and a number of other heads of state, but wasn’t really part of this large multilateral negotiating process. They essentially arrived on -- toward the end of the meeting the last couple of days realized that there was nothing really ready for them to sign off on and took the initiative and actually negotiated a set of -- a very small document, a set of principles in the Copenhagen Accord that allows countries to essentially transmit or commit to a national policy of energy, clean energy and emissions reductions.

HULTMANIt isn't binding in the legal sense of being kind of monitored internationally and verified that way. So Copenhagen produced this Copenhagen Accord, but again, by many countries who were not in the room negotiating, it was seen as, if not completely illegitimate, at least questionable. And the negotiations at Cancun moved actually fairly far forward in bringing those countries back into the process.

NNAMDIThe Cancun talks concluded on Saturday morning. What were the goals for Cancun?

HULTMANThe goals for Cancun were, again, very mild. Essentially just to -- again, the primary goal was really just to get the countries talking again. There was a great loss of trust between, in particular, the developed and developing country parties in Copenhagen. In part, because of a number of arguably misunderstandings and miscommunications that happened, but it really touched a central nerve of the climate negotiations which is this question of who should do what and when?

HULTMANAnd a lot of the developing country parties really believed that the developed world should, in fact, take the first steps and go first. But there are nuances to how that should happen and those tensions flared up at Copenhagen. The main goal at Cancun was to essentially get the parties talking again, get them back to the table and start to agree on some ways forward.

NNAMDIWhat was agreed to in Cancun?

HULTMANWell, at Cancun, we had a number of specific provisions. These, again, are not the -- arguably the Holy Grail in climate negotiations is get all countries to commit to reductions and their own emissions in the long term. And for the most part, those really difficult negotiations were not even attempted at Cancun. Everybody knew they would be too difficult to reach an agreement on so people focused on smaller issues that were maybe easier to get agreement on.

HULTMANThere's a new green climate fund, which will help fund adaptation and clean energy in developing countries. There's something called a technology mechanism, which is a new approach to thinking about how we encourage countries to implement new technologies. There are provisions for reducing deforestation in developing countries, a process for discussing adaptation. There’s a new process for reporting mitigation commitments along the lines of Copenhagen. So it brings the Copenhagen Accord into this larger, multilateral process and a few other sort of more minor provisions that I think will, in fact, help with the negotiations going forward.

NNAMDIIn case you're just joining us, we're talking about the recently concluded global climate talks in Cancun with Nathan Hultman. He's a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and a nonresident fellow of the Brookings Institution. We're taking your calls at 800-433-8850. What do you think prospects are for cooperation between countries on climate change? 800-433-8850. The Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement that requires most wealthy nations to trim their emissions while providing assistance to developing countries to pursue a cleaner energy future, that issue was apparently pushed to the future, the issue of extending the Kyoto Protocol.

HULTMANThat's correct. And, in fact, it was a little bit more difficult than that even. Japan, of course the host of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and a country who has, in fact, embraced -- had embraced the Kyoto Protocol subsequently said at Cancun that they would not take a commitment under a second period in Kyoto. So they essentially said we are abandoning this particular method of reporting our emissions reduction targets.

HULTMANWhat that meant is that the Kyoto Protocol has this very strange situation where there's a Kyoto Protocol that has essentially been pushed forward into the future, that we may or may not take this up in the future and then a parallel set of agreements, which in the climate world is called long term cooperative action. Which, in fact, is seeming to be more interesting to a larger number of players, including the United States, China, India and a lot of the other developed countries.

HULTMANSo there is still an issue that remains to be resolved and that is how to deal with the Kyoto. Which some developing country parties would like to keep but a number of other key emitters are really not that interested in.

NNAMDIKyoto, of course, expires in the year 2012. Climate talks have been bogged down for years by rifts between rich and poor nations including in last year's Copenhagen Accords. Is that divide still a big sticking point or did Cancun help to kind of break it?

HULTMANI think Cancun...

NNAMDIBridge it, so to speak.

HULTMAN...Yeah, I think Cancun moved in the right direction. When the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated and then the lead up to that actually following on the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, people really conceived of the world as the developed and the developing countries and that was how the world was viewed in terms of obligations and it was how the world was viewed in terms of responsibilities. I think that there is wide spread agreement, not just in this country, but around the world that that model of thinking about who has responsibility and who has obligations.

HULTMANNumber one is no longer relevant if we look at the large emerging economies, Brazil, India and China in particular. They're not...

NNAMDIThere's a tendency to lump developing countries into one category, but that is no longer accurate?

HULTMANExactly. That's exactly the point and that they're...

NNAMDIYou look at India, you look at China, you look at Brazil. There's something different.

HULTMANExactly. They are economies that are, in fact, very developed by some measures and they have a strong manufacturing presence. They have intellectual capacity. They have engineering capacity. And it is well within their abilities to envision their own clean energy transitions, something that they could encourage in their own domestic economies in the same way that we think about energy policy in our country.

HULTMANHow can we balance the need for clean energy versus the need for energy security and other kinds of concerns? So they're wrestling with those questions, too, and I think again, the other question is obligation. Who's responsible for moving on this issue? And there, too, there's a widespread agreement internationally that climate change is a sufficient importance that all countries have some obligation to help.

NNAMDIOn to William, in Montgomery County, Md. Hi, William, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

WILLIAMYeah, my question is, I've been supporting organizations, I guess, these conservation organizations in the area. And otherwise, I believe in these organizations, but I'm beginning to find them talking about trying to work on climate change, whether through legal means or because it's related to problems they're having, for example, with Chesapeake Bay. And when I look at the political environment we have today and the difficulty of getting anything moving in this area, I'm beginning to wonder if it's wise to start targeting my contributions away from something that I can see the U.S. saying for -- you know, U.S. conservatives saying for years into the future, I'm sorry, until the rest of the world agrees, we don't want to get involved in it, whether it's -- am I wasting my money by giving to people who are talking about using some of it to help move climate change?

HULTMANWell, that's a great question and it gets a couple of sort of sub questions. One of which is, you know, how important is climate change? If you're concerned about natural ecosystems and the natural environment, that -- sort of local ecosystems like the Chesapeake Bay. The kind of short answer to that is that those areas will be affected most likely by climate change, both by extreme weather events in the future and also by a kind of gradual warming changes in sea level.

HULTMANSo those organizations have some justification for being concerned about the consequences of climate change. And this is an issue not only for natural ecosystems, but also for a lot of human communities around the world. So it's for that reason that a lot of advocacy organizations have, in fact, put climate change on their agenda and are working toward the goal of getting some kind of action on that front.

HULTMANNow, the other question's, of course, what's the most valuable way for them to sort of spend their dollars? That’s an issue that's up to every single organization to think about and the issue of whether it's possible and whether it's important I think we need to remember are separate.

NNAMDIAnd I'm glad you brought that up because you feel a lot of the progress that's being made is not on the international level, but on the individual country level and that could show us the way forward. A lot of developing countries are moving forward on their own with green energy technologies.

HULTMANThat's absolutely right. A lot of these, in particular, the larger emerging economies that we mentioned a few minutes ago, China, India and Brazil, have very aggressive domestic policies on clean energy and renewable energy. It's just one example. China has made a lot of effort to take on a target and be very clear about their goals of reducing their own -- what's called emissions intensity. So that's how many greenhouse gas emissions they produce per unit of GDP or economic output by 40 percent by 2020.

HULTMANIt's a very ambitious goal. That does not mean that they, at an absolute level, will reduce their total emissions, but it's one indicator. It's a concrete target and they have agreed to take this on and they're going to do this through fairly aggressive rollout of wind energy efficiency, even solar. And that's something that I think a lot of people in the U.S. are just not aware of, that we are, in fact -- that these other countries, who we often view as kind of a economic competitor, are, in fact, arguably taking this issue of clean energy more seriously than we have.

NNAMDINathan Hultman, thank you very much for joining us. Nathan Hultman is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution. He's also the associate director for the Joint Global Change Research Institute at the Pacific Northwest Laboratory. We're gonna take a short break. When we come back, the dream of many foreign-born students in the U.S., trying to build better lives, not only for themselves, but to improve the lives of people back home. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.