From Copenhagen to Cancún (From Nopenhagen to No-Can-Do)

I'm in Cancún for week two of COP16. A year ago I was freezing my backside off in a line in Copenhagen waiting to get credentials, winding my way through a Kafkaesque study in bureaucratic incompetency. Things couldn't be more different this year. After waking up to an amazing view of white sands flanked by the turquoise ocean, I breezed through the credentials line yesterday (took me all of 5 minutes). Expectations are low for this COP (this is not Hopenhagen). No surprise there. It's both purposeful, as a way to ensure the conference doesn't repeat the debacle of Copenhagen by raising expectations too high, and literal, in that nobody really expects much to happen (i.e., no binding agreement, just incremental progress on things like fast-start-financing, REDD, tech transfer, etc.). There are some subtle developments on CCS--which happened last week. I'll be talking about this in subsequent posts, as well as blogging on other COP related developments.