As the global climate change meeting proceeds in Cancun this week, with top leaders now arriving to replace lower level officials for the talks, a combination of factors has dimmed much hope for a new, meaningful accord - though anything is still possible.

 A major sticking point is that while most of Europe plus Japan and others are part of the current Kyoto Protocol on emissions, with the 2001 agreement set now to expire in 2012, neither China nor the US is on-board, as well as other developing countries such as India.

"There is a challenge that not everyone is part of the Kyoto Protocol", EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard said at a press conference in Cancun last week.

Developing countries have said they won't move towards any new treaty until members of the Kyoto Protocol agree to extend the treaty beyond 2012.

But Japan, Russia and Canada have refused to extend Kyoto without the participation of the China and the US. Strangely, China, the second largest C02 emitter heading towards number 1, currently isis exempt from the controls anyways under Kyoto as it is considered a developing country.

Japan took it a step further by saying it will not support a Kyoto extension at all, and would only participate under the vague framework developed last year at the climate meeting in Copenhagen.

China, however, somewhat altered the dynamics of the conference by saying this week that it is prepared to accept binding commitments for greenhouse gas reduction. That potential commitment, however, would only be around its "carbon intensity" only,  a relative measure  per unit of output or GDP. It would not be a commitment to reduce levels in absolute terms - almost impossible for a country still undeveloped in most parts of the country and enjoying significant economic growth - that many believe is essential to stop global warming.

China wants to find a way to not be seen as the cause of the Cancun talks collapsing while not making any commitments that could hold back its economy or competitiveness.

However China may well ask for different than itself and others those for developed countries,  whose emissions reductions are subject to international scrutiny and monitoring. China in the past has refused to be part of a binding agreement involving outside verification that it is making good on its promises to curb emissions.

Divide Between Developed and Developing Economies is a Huge Barrier

While the Obama administration in general supports an agreement that would commit the US to a Kyoto-like program, the current economic situation in the US and other factors limit what the president might sign up for. Perhaps more importantly, if the agreement comes in the form of a treaty, the chances of such an agreement getting through the Senate for approval are questionable at best, especially with Republicans gaining seats in November.

But longer term, the divide between developed and developing economies may pose the largest obstacle to any sort of true global agreement.

For decades, "the position of developing nations has been the same: They would not agree to anything that compromised their economic development," writes Rupert Darwall, author of  the upcoming book  "Global Warming: A Short History," in the Wall Street Journal this week.

To address that, there have been calls for developed nations to contribute as much $100 billion per year by 2020 to help developing countries cut their carbon emissions and compensate for lost economic growth. This idea seems unlikely to be accepted today by the many developed countries with struggling economies and enormous debt problems.

"The refusal of the Third World en bloc to agree to verifiable emissions targets suggests that they see the notion of "green growth" as an environmentalist fairy tale," Darwell adds.

The likelihood of any major agreement therefore looks very small.

"While the Copenhagen Accord, like Kyoto, still maintains the pretense that it will culminate in a binding agreement among major emitters to reduce emissions, the same intractable conflicts among major economies that have thwarted international agreement to legally binding emissions caps are not likely to be resolved through the Copenhagen approach,"  write Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus in a blog post this week on TheEnergy Collective.com.

"Future climate action is more likely to resemble what Japan has been proposing since the 2007 Bali climate talks - developed nations primarily focusing on developing and deploying advanced energy technologies in order to reduce their own emissions while working sector by sector with developing economies to transfer the appropriate technologies that can facilitate growth with low carbon technology," they add.

If true, this will have a huge impact on the future of supply chains, since (as we have noted many times) how companies behave will dramatically different if there are real costs based on something like a cap and trade program or carbon taxes than if there are not.

What do you expect, if anything, to come out of the Cancun climate meeting? Can the developed versus developing economies divide over CO2 ever be solved? Let us know your thoughts at the Feedback button below.

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