THOSE WERE IMPRESSIVE WORDS Monday when some of the 150 world leaders gathered in Paris in a renewed attempt to get agreement on action to combat the causes of climate change.

The attempts at Kyoto 18 years ago and more recently in Copenhagen succeeded only in getting most, but not all, of the major industrial nations to the point where they agreed something had to be done.

The timelines since Kyoto are unimpressive. The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in the Japanese city in 1997 and supposedly came into force in February 2005, giving the nations that adopted it an obligation to reduce carbon emissions on developed countries by 2012.

It was followed in 2005 by an action plan produced at a conference in Montreal. But the plan was merely an agreement to extend the expiry date of the Kyoto protocol beyond 2012 and negotiate “deeper cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions.”

In 2009, the COP15 (the United Nations’ 15th Conference of the Parties) was held in Copen- hagen, where essentially nothing was accomplished.

Since then, in 2011, a Green Climate Fund was created at COP17 in Durban, South Africa. The current meeting, COP21, is expected to be historic, in being the first meeting in over 20 years of UN negotiations in which the parties for once are aiming at signing a universal agreement on climate, with the target of keeping fur- ther global warming below 2o Celsius from the current expectation of a rise of 2.5o to 3.76oC. According to the official website of the Paris conference, the convention was expected to attract about 50,000 participants, including 150 heads of state and 25,000 official delegates from government, intergovernmental organizations, UN agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society. Reducing dependence on fossil fuels is likely to be the key focus of the conference, which is expected to last two weeks.

But it remains to be seen what really will be accomplished, even if the nations come up with an agreement of some sort.

Ultimately, it will all depend on how many of the signatories follow through.

We’ve already witnessed the effective demise of the Kyoto Protocol. The Protocol’s goal was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by setting internationally binding emission-reduction targets.

The first commitment period, during which countries were bound to meet these targets, ran from 2008 to 2012. At that time 37 countries and the European Union had binding goals. Developing countries like China and India were excluded from the list because, as the UN put it, “the Protocol places a heavier burden on devel- oped nations under the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities.’” The United States, the world’s second biggest producer of greenhouse gases, signed the Protocol but Congress refused to ratify it. The average target was a 5% cut from 1990 to 2012, but few, if any of the signatories reached even that modest target.

Will it be any different this time around? We doubt it, although chances are Canada will do a lot better than it has in past, thanks to the approach taken by the new federal government in bringing the provinces aboard, as well as by the changing political climate that has seen centre-left governments elected in almost all the provinces.

And while the current Chinese leadership seems to be taking the issue seriously, there is clearly less enthusiasm in India as the third-largest single polluter, or in the U.S, Congress, where the Republican majorities in both houses seem to be dominated by climate-change deniers.

It will be interesting, indeed, to see whether outgoing President Barack Obama will win any converts to the cause of reducing greenhouse gases, as well as what, if anything, can be done by the U.S. federal government if state governments refuse to co-operate.

For example, can the U.S. federal government force the privately owned electric utilities to close their coal-fired power plants or at least convert them to natural gas?

And, for that matter, is there even any way U.S. border states can be persuaded to reduce the coal-fired power production by taking surplus ‘clean’ power from Canada?

We guess only time will tell.