Climate change has been correctly identified as a threat multiplier. Yet it has already become a divisive issue internationally before a plan for a low-carbon future has emerged.
Just as the five original nuclear- weapons states helped fashion the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to perpetuate their privileges, states that become wealthy early wish to preserve their prerogatives in a climate-change regime, despite their legacy of environmental damage and continuing high carbon emissions.
This has raised the danger that efforts to lock in the rich nations' advantages by revising the 1992 Rio bargain and rejiggering the Kyoto Protocol obligations through a new regime could create another global divide between haves and have-nots — an NPT of climate change. In fact, a new bargain is at the heart of the efforts to fashion a 2009 Copenhagen Protocol.