Russia doesn't seem to care two bits about global warming, and it's not hard to see why. Most Russians would probably be happy if the country was a little warmer. Officials even joke that once climate change has run its course, people may start pouring in to Siberia instead of trying to escape it. If the polar icecaps melt any further, Russia would also be able to drill for oil and gas in the Arctic Ocean, where it's believed to have huge fossil fuel reserves. For the rest of the planet, however, the picture is not so cheerful.


To say that Russia is hesitant about tackling climate change is putting it mildly. The last time the world tried to get the country's cooperation on the issue was in 1997 during the negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty on limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Because Russia is the world's third-largest source of emissions after the U.S. and China, the accord would have failed without it. So the treaty was written in a way that would allow Russia to keep polluting as much as it wanted and grant the country billions of dollars in emission allowances to sell to other countries that needed to meet their Kyoto commitments.

As one U.N. official who participated in the talks put it: "Russia got the sweetest deal: free money, no restrictions." But apparently even that wasn't enough. It took another seven years of painstaking negotiations — and promises from the West to help Russia join the World Trade Organization —to get the country to ratify the deal.