Six months after UN climate talks splintered in Copenhagen, pundits are still chewing over what went wrong. Do future UN meetings, in Cancun this December and in Cape Town in 2011, have any chance of rescuing a global deal in which countries will agree to set meaningful limits on their emissions? If not, where do we go from here?

Speaking on Sunday at the Smith School’s World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford, UK, Dan Bodansky (pictured), an expert in climate change law, asserted that the troubles in Copenhagen were not down to dysfunctional negotiations during the conference. Instead, the problem lay with basic political disagreements that had not changed before or after the meeting. Apart from the differences of position between developed and developing countries, the US and China are both fundamentally unwilling to sign up to binding international commitments, he noted. “I am sceptical that these meetings will do better in the future,” he said.

Away from the formal UN routes, 138 nations have so far associated themselves with the Copenhagen Accord, the bare-bones agreement that was hastily negotiated outside UN protocols by the United States, China, India, South Africa and Brazil. It recognizes that the global temperature rise should be kept below 2°C and pledges that developing countries should get $100 billion by 2020 to help with this. But the Accord is not legally binding, doesn’t prescribe any emissions targets, and is not clear on how any money should be gathered and transferred. (Michael Grubb, of the University of Cambridge, added that there was no way sovereign governments would be able to gather $100 billion). An opinion piece published in Nature in April noted that pledges so far made in conjunction with the Accord are nowhere near enough to keep the planet’s warming to below 2°C.

One way for industrialized nations and the EU to move the UN negotiations forwards might be to stop anxiously trying to get the US to commit to binding international emissions targets, Grubb suggested. The country is clearly reluctant to do so, and its green domestic policies seem driven by worries about oil supply, not carbon. “The EU should say we can do this with or without the US, and see what happens,” Grubb argued.

If UN talks are stalled, Bodansky suggested two other ways of making global progress. First, international organizations such as the International Maritime Organization or the International Civil Aviation Organization might agree new standards for ship design or aviation emissions. They operate by majority voting, not the UN’s near-impossible-to-achieve consensus.

Second, separate countries may soon set up trading schemes on carbon emissions, analogous to the European Union’s. If this led to industries in some parts of the world paying higher prices so that they could emit carbon dioxide, countries might start to impose trading tariffs against manufacturers from regions without carbon trading schemes. The World Trade Organization might then step in to argue against such tariffs, and this might lead to globally unified regulations on carbon trading. At least, so hopes Bodansky, and also David King, director of the Smith School and previously chief scientific adviser to the UK government. (King, who has been advocating this view since December 2009, elaborated on this argument recently in a New Scientist editorial; in the same issue, journalists Fred Pearce and Catherine Brahic add more to this discussion).

Christiana Figueres, the new UN climate chief who will officially replace Yvo de Boer from 1 July, has already admitted that an all-encompassing deal is ‘unlikely in her lifetime’. The discussions at the Smith School found little to refute that prognosis.

Dan Bodansky/Smith School for Enterprise and the Environment