Mardi Gras
Overview
Continuously increased public pressure and local climate disasters made governments to make some agreement on emissions reduction policies. Some countries like India and China started looking for the solution of energy consumption increase in nuclear power or "alternative" energy sources. Improved "green" technologies, involvement of corporations and support both from China and US allowed most of the countries to agree and ratify realistic reductions agreement, that should allow to stabilize the planet's eco-environment.
2010-2013
After a spectacular fiasco of Copenhagen 2010 Negotiations following discussions did not bring much results and no one really believed that Cancun, planned for the end of the year, will make any difference. All thoughts, blaming and fears were thrown into US and China. Even Europe, that used to the role of pioneer in implementing "green" policies, was losing public support more and more every day.
However nature already started giving humanity some clues on later events. Earthquakes in China and Chile, forest fires in Russia and flood in Pakistan were followed by extremely cold winter in Western Europe and part of Northern America.
During Cancun meeting, as it was expected, no big agreements were made. But two points made event rather remarkable. Those are surprisingly high attention of public and media that have put a lot of additional pressure on negotiators and by a couple of loud statements made by Russian delegation. And despite the fact that statements were more populist that anything else, they locked some attention asking to pay attention to 'the climate catastrophe that is already going on'.
Following couple of years were followed by fighting and struggling around climate change. Those years brought new local tragedies in a face of floods, droughts and fires. However they also brought full support to project REDD from EU and some agreement on LCA content amongst leading economies, fixing somewhat "average" options in most.
In 2012 two big things happens in opposite sides of the world. Firstly, the elections in United States where democrats were able to keep the president's chair and who included promises on climate policies in their election company following the flow of increasing public support to the topic. Soon after that new bill was passed by House, putting on the table new reduction goals, which are reminded of the those from Kyoto Protocol. Secondly, China rushed into the fast growing "green energy" market with cheap and efficient solar panels. Some specialist said that this was one of the reasons why China came back to the constructive dialog about climate.
At a same time China and India even to the biggest extent, identified for their self nuclear power as energy generation problem solution and implemented massive programs on building a number of new nuclear power plants.
In year 2013 IPCC published it's 5th assessment report pointing that situation is going down even faster than was projected and so made public and media attack negotiators with a new power.
2014-2018
More and more corporations world-wide recent years started moving towards AAA Green Rankings being put under the pressure of NGOs from one side and their "as green as you can be" business partners from the other. Leading countries governments being pushed by public to seal the deal met this corporations behavior as a relief and came back to the LCA discussion. In 2014 a number of countries ratified LCA, which was consolidated recently with some other Climate Change proposals, such as the REDD agreement (the last one became as part of the main document by demand from Brazil and some other countries, who faced huge forest fires in Amazonian earlier this year). Some were upset to realize that it was mainly the same countries who already ratified Kyoto Protocol before. Others were happy to see United States joining the agreement. But third started pointing to the fact that according to IPCC reports this document was already out of date even before being signed and has to be remade again to bring any real benefit.
Being put into the changing climate conditions some countries as US or Japan followed Russia's example and implemented new adaption plans in their Climate Change policies. While keeping some distance from other negotiators even after coming back to the table, China faced two consecutive years of droughts, which lead to the food supply crisis and even hunger in the Northern regions of the country. Some Chinese companies already showed loses recent years because of the issues with "green" business partners and additional duties imposed for Chinese imports (despite the China's protest to World Trade Organisation) by some countries in both Americas and in Europe. Hunger became a final chord that put country into the recession.
Already possessing green technologies and losing acceleration in growth rates, China comes to the plateau in amount of emissions. In 2018 China ratified LCA and therefore released itself from export duties and opened for it's "green energy" technologies new markets.
In the middle of 2018 IPCC puts new 6th report on a table, saying that "sorry guys, but it didn't work". Projections showed that polar and Himalayan ices continue melting and projected temperature increase is still far above 2 degrees by 2050.
2019-2020
LCA was reworked in a shortest time and put with a realistic figures for the countries discussion. It took almost 2 years of regular conferences,meetings and debates to make countries agree on conditions. Process of moving from "paying out sins" LCA to the "saving the planet" LCA was not as long as for agreeing on the first one, but was not less painful as well. However, after India and China jumped on the boat it was finished.