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A deal in Durban Dec 11th 2011, 18:08 by J.A. | DURBAN IN THE early hours of December 11th, after three days and nights of exhausting, often ill-tempered, final negotiations, the UNs two-week-long climate-change summit ended in Durban with an agreement. Its terms-assuming they are acted upon-are unlikely to be sufficient to prevent a global temperature rise of more than 2C. They might easily allow a 4C rise. Yet with many governments distracted by pressing economic worries, the deal was as much as could have been expected from Durban; perhaps a little more. The core of it is, in effect, a quid-pro-quo arrangement between the European Union and big developing-country polluters, including China and India. For its part, the EU will undertake a second round of emissions abatement under the Kyoto protocol, after its main provisions expire at the end of 2012. That will prolong the shelf-life of a treaty that imposes no emissions-cutting burden on any developing country. In return, all countries have agreed to negotiate a new mitigation regime by 2015 and make it operational by 2020. Crucially, this new regime will see the burden of emission-cutting shared among all countries, even if rich ones will still be expected to do much more than poorer countries. This commitment, which was reached despite last-ditch resistance from China and India, and despite little enthusiasm for it from America, looks like the Durban summits biggest achievement. It promises to break a divisive and anachronistic distinction between developed and developing countries, which has thoroughly poisoned the waters of the UN process. It has also rendered it ineffective, given that the so-called developing countries given a free pass under Kyoto, including South Korea and Saudi Arabia as well as China and India, are now responsible for 58% of global emissions. | 
