Delegates from more than 190 countries packed their bags and headed for the airport this weekend after a gruelling United Nations climate conference in Paris. Their work, however, is far from done. For all their fine intentions and triumphant rhetoric about a historic deal in Paris, leaders scrambling to wean the world off fossil fuels are facing a problem: cheap oil.
Locked inside Le Bourget’s conference centre in suburban Paris, it is unlikely that more than a few delegates were paying much attention when a different international summit in another European capital, Vienna, broke up amid chaotic scenes a few days earlier. They should have done, because Opec’s failure to fix a production ceiling may turn out to be the biggest and most immediate obstacle