Plastics failure Is a canary in the climate coal mine

It is easy to blame Opec and its allies, which act as wreckers on environment deals, but harder to do the work at home to eliminate polymers from our lives.

- David Fickling

You might have missed it amid the noise of the Trump transition and the sound of the European and Japanese auto industries collapsing. But the failure of an obscure United Nations meeting in South Korea at the weekend is a sign of how the entire edifice of environmental diplomacy is creaking.

The meeting in the port city of Busan was intended to hammer out the text of a treaty to prevent plastic pollution, ahead of a planned summit to formalise the agreement in 2025.

It would then join existing UN conventions on biodiversity and the ozone layer - along with by far the most well-known such institution, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC.

It is common to treat these meetings as meaningless talking shops, but that is not right. We have already measurably slowed global warming and prevented millions of cancer deaths thanks to the 1987 Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting chemicals. Policies enacted under the UNFCCC helped push carbon emissions about 12 per cent below the direction they were headed in 15 years ago.

As my colleague Mark Gongloff points out, these meetings would not be so contentious if they did not have real-world consequences.

A single UN member country can block the entire process, and nations that benefit from the status quo have every reason to exercise their vetoes.