In November 2006 over six thousand officials from 180 countries, along with representatives from international business and labour movements, NGOs and faith groups, schoolchildren and a host of other observers, gathered in Kenya for two weeks of discussion. They were there to attend the Twelfth Annual Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Second Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol. Chauffeured from the airport, through the vast slums that constitute much of the country's urban landscape, and sequestered in Nairobi's tree-lined UN compound, they came, ostensibly, to agree current and future actions to meet the overall objective of the convention: to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions and prevent dangerous climate change. That is, they met apparently to avoid catastrophe.

This catastrophe has several names – salinity valves, carbon pumps, methane outbursts, glacial retreats, deep water formation – together signifying the collapse of the material basis for life itself. The breakthrough that climate observers, NGOs and at least some delegates wanted to see most is agreement on an international treaty to take over from the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. The European Union, in particular, has called for warming not to rise more than two degrees above preindustrial levels, representing about 400–450 parts per million (ppm) of greenhouse gases to non-greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. If this can be done then everybody can apparently rest easy: a few extra hurricanes, a couple of submerged islands, some odd weather events, but overall an environment the rich can get richer in, the poor supposedly become less poor. After hours of discussion, silent and exhausted, rows of impassive middle-aged men and women with coffee-stained grey hands clapped the final smack of the gavel that sounded the end of the conference. And achieved an agreement to carry on talking.

The political process to agree what needs to be done is frozen. Such paralysis has a particular poignancy, for at stake in this process – the earth's climate – is what should, by definition, be common to the totality of any imagined global community. Indeed, for some, it is this aspect of climate change that has been seen to offer a certain perverse form of political hope, as a phenomenon that, observable and empirical as it is, also possesses some inherently transcendental force of appeal. Certainly, the ultimate horizon of the earth as condition of possibility for human existence itself (at least for the present) takes the visible threat of climate change into a different realm than just another example of the many in history that constitute the so-called 'tragedy of the commons'. If Kant once thought that the global form of the earth itself offered hope for 'perpetual peace', today, from the perspective of current planetary transformations in its ecology, the earth appears as something like an apocalyptic pure sum. Emissions circulate equally throughout the system. With global warming it precisely makes no difference where greenhouse gases are emitted. [...]