Question: Can we negotiate an international treaty which sufficiently reduces carbon emissions without unfairly punishing any one country or region?

Premise: UN Climate Summit: A binding treaty must be agreed to by all participating countries (applies to both major and minor roles!)

Major roles:

US - Chas

European Union - Mary Evans

China - Anna

Alliance of Small Island States - Chloe

Minor roles:

Australia - Aileen

Saudi Arabia - Max

India - George

Brazil - Nathan

Required Reading

• Summary of Copenhagen Climate Accord - A nice summary of how the negotiations went down, drama and all
• Summary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol - The nuts and bolts of the treaty
• Climate Policies in Key Countries - focus on your country
• Emissions Targets by Country - focus on your country

Additional Reading

• Climate Change: A Patchwork of Emissions Cuts (Nature article)
• Market-based climate mitigation policies in emerging economies
• International carbon emissions
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change This international organization "reviews and assesses the most recent scientific, technical and socio-economic information produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of climate change." Highly scientific and a little dense, it might work best to look at the quick link PDFs of relevant documents or use the tables of contents attached to reports to focus your reading.
• Timeline: The Science and Politics of Global Warming - PBS Frontline (Pay special attention to 1992 and 1997)
• Kyoto Protocol: The Protocol and Wake Up Call - Newsweek    
• United Nations Conference on Environment & Development (1992 : Rio de Janeiro, Brazil): Earth Summit: Rio Report Card - Nature

Additional Resources

• Lexis Nexis  
  Search here for news articles; using terms like "climate change action plan" (in quotes) and "Obama." Use the "Newspapers" pull down menu to get more U.S. sources.

• PAIS International
  A political science database that indexes articles and books on public policy topics in the United States and internationally.