I'm in New York for a week of multilateralism and do-goodery. Multilateralism in the form of a UN meeting on climate change today, and do-goodery as demonstrated by the Clinton Global Initiative. Night One was a dinner with some UN Climate Change folks who wanted to Meet The Bloggers.
Sadly, meeting the bloggers involved a lot of asking what a blog is and isn't, and whether we check facts, and how we differ from an op-ed page, and a lot of other conversational avenues that I thought were exhausted in early-2005. Dinner sort of hummed along in this agreeable-but-dull fashion till one of the UN types shattered the comity by angrily saying that none of us had asked passionate questions about climate change yet, and didn't we understand this would kill us all and it mattered!? And we did! What we hadn't been convinced of was that anything going on here mattered.
Here's the problem: When it comes to pressuring major nations to undertake policy initiatives they're not favorably disposed towards, the UN is rather toothless. It can quietly persuade or publicly shame. Up till now, it has sought quiet persuasion, with little to no effect on the behavior of America, China, or India. It has not sent Secretary Moon to forthrightly blast our apparent indifference, and the consequences our shortsighted sluggishness will have on the rest of the world. This is not something the UN feels able to do.
