Obama’s presidency began with a 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, granted in no small part to lure him to that year’s United Nations (UN) climate negotiations in Copenhagen. The 2009 talks were greatly ambitious, with the world’s environmental ministers and advocates believing that the replacement of George W. Bush would allow for a binding global treaty to stop global warming.

But those ambitions were unrealized, and frankly unrealizable — as it turns out, the cartoonishly anti-science and oil-drenched swagger of Bush-Cheney were not actually the only thing keeping the great global ship of extractive capitalism on a course toward civilizational destruction. It also turns out that the thousands of very earnest and intelligent functionaries who engage in international climate diplomacy aren’t actually at the global tiller.

Despite the Copenhagen collapse, the talks continue, the challenge unsolved.