ABSTRACT
As the people roared and the delegates of prosperous nations unflinchingly dragged their heels upon reaching a binding agreement at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen 2009, leaders of low-income countries garnered together in solidarity to protest the self-interested opportunism threatening to turn the results of the talks into lukewarm tokenistic gestures. The stark divide between the developed and developing world was also exposed as outdated and simplistic, especially as many began pointing the finger at the Chinese for weakening the final accord. What will it take to produce lasting change? How many more hurricanes, droughts, melting ice-caps, species extinction, greenhouse gas emissions, rises in sea level, and so on does it take for a global commons to start acting as one?
