Richard Graves's Climate Chronicles

The United Nations climate process is an obsession with a subset of the environmental community, the only route by which global warming can be tackled on the scale it requires. It can be vague and confoundingly policy heavy, with jargon and acronym-laden language impenetrable to outsiders.

That process is now coming to a defining moment. With the Obama administration moving rapidly to turn the old Bush climate policy on its head, it would appear that the stars are aligning for a global climate treaty to be crafted with the United States on board, an accomplishment that escaped the Kyoto Protocol.

However, the road to Copenhagen goes through the American Midwest, and it appears to get rocky.

Senators from Midwestern manufacturing and coal-using states have pushed back on the idea of an international climate treaty. As dirty industry leans on senators whose states are facing rising unemployment and shuttered factories, the debate of climate vs. economy is still alive and well, despite the appointment of Van Jones as a White House adviser on green jobs and reports like McKinsey's outlining how stabilizing emissions has a close to net zero cost.

The only way for the Obama administration to pull together the votes to bring the United States on board for Copenhagen may be by tying it to a successful push for clean energy in the Midwest, and that hinges largely on the work of young people, labor groups, and innovative clean energy projects in the region.

Poznan, Poland – Over 500 young people from 54 countries have descended on the UN climate talks here to demand strong action from government delegates to safeguard their future. Even though young people from developed nations outnumber counterparts with more at stake from Least Developed Countries and from Small Island States, they are making common cause to call for one principle: Survival.

I interviewed Harlan Watson, lead climate negotiator for the Bush administration who didn't think the UN climate process officially demands the survival of every sovereign nation and people as an outcome.

That would mean, for example, taking responsibility to prevent small island nations, sovereign under the UN process but weak politically and economically, from slipping beneath the waves. The only way to do that would be to require large emissions cuts, on the order of 350 ppm that campaigners are calling for, and provide significant resources for adaptation. Germany has committed 30% of carbon auction proceeds to go to international uses, such as technology development, transfer, and adaptation, but there seems to be little appetite for it from the outgoing US administration.