US Secretary of State John Kerry said a global deal to limit climate change could not have been won without China's help "to build a working partnership". But that soft power win was of short duration. With the thugs outside Pu Zhiqiang's trial, Beijing was back to form, squandering soft power as if it had no use for it.

With the swing of a gavel on Saturday, the world’s nations adopted the first international agreement to limit the causes of anthropogenic climate change. For the first time in history, more than 150 countries have promised to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide they emit into the atmosphere and to increase these reductions over time.  

We’re now in the second week of negotiations at the COP21 conference in Paris, and momentum is building, with more and more countries acknowledging the crucial goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. It’s an ambitious target to hit, and we need your help to deliver a bold message to the delegates, negotiators, and observers. So we hope you’ll join us as we send a love letter from Earth to Paris this week. 

Climate negotiators in Paris are wrangling over [...] "caps" and "cuts" in greenhouse gases. Some environmentalists argue [...] that consumption [is missing]. In India, [...] little will change unless fossil-fuel-reliant rich countries moderate their own consumption […] "In the current world order, everyone wants to be an American. If that is the benchmark, then we all should forget about saving the planet," Bhushan says.

China’s top negotiator at the UN summit on climate change practically gushed as he described his country’s relationship with California […] And with a slew of agreements with foreign leaders, Gov. Brown has turned California’s Air Resources Board and Environmental Protection Agency into de facto diplomatic organizations […] “California basically has a foreign policy,” said David Victor, a UC San Diego professor.

For the first time in the 19-year history of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), civil society observers of the talks were walking out. So what? Because the so-called observers have become an integral part of the open U.N. negotiations, and the thousands of activists who attend the yearly climate conference serve as the unofficial conscience of the entire process.