PARIS – Join us as we stroll through Le Bourget Airport, site of Lindberg’s landing and now the Climate Conference. ( Aside: No, Illinois Times did not really send me to Paris.)

Our first impression is the smell of French bread baking in special ovens constructed for the conference. Next, we are overwhelmed by people everywhere in this vast conference site, some 30,000 diplomats and delegates, 3,000 journalists, plus thousands of others. People scurrying everywhere. We walk into a meeting of the, “Low-Lying Pacific Islands.” One island, Tuvalu, has become partly submerged and its climate refugees have nowhere to go. The islanders want “loss and damage” provisions in the agreement.

An assemblage of international business organizations lies directly ahead. Bill Gates’s group announces massive technology and energy investment. The extractive industries decry the conference, insisting that poverty can only be reduced through fossil-fueled growth. Then looming up is a big placard stating, “The market can do the job. Give firms assurance of rising carbon prices and they will invest in a green future.” Wow, that’s it. But will the conference put a price on carbon?

Then we meet the Indian delegation, which has brought together developing states who proclaim that they will not sacrifice their economic growth. “We did not cause this problem and we have every right to burn fossil fuels in order to develop.” Somewhat angrily, the Nicaraguan delegate tells us they will not agree to a “loser” conference, while the Ethiopian delegate exclaims, “Without action, East African people will perish.”

We have a restorative glass of wine with Wu Sei, the upbeat head of the China delegation, who tells us that the conference will produce a treaty binding all nations to the agreed cuts. Then we recall President Obama’s speech: “The treaty will not be legally binding.”

We look up at a big screen displaying a Fox News report that the conference will achieve nothing. Adding up all the country emission pledges will only decrease earth’s temperature by two-tenths of a degree by 2100. Then the U.N. view appears on screen reporting, “The conference will decrease temperature by 2 degrees.” Very confusing, but is there much difference between a destructive 6-degree Fahrenheit increase and a destructive 8-degree increase?

We spot a Republican congressman who says the next Republican president will annul U.S. actions here because the American people want jobs, not regulations. We reply that today the solar industry in America produces twice the jobs of coal mining.

Fortunately, we notice the American climate hero Bill McKibben taking a break. He tells us that in his estimation the conference will be both a “success and a disaster. Success, because in just five years since Copenhagen the cost of solar cells has come down a whopping 80 percent.” We are stunned. He continues, “Just think. There is only one way to control global warming and that is for the world to switch from fossil fuel energy to solar and wind as quickly, or even more quickly, as possible. Now lower solar costs make this possible, and if we also boost the carbon price with a tax, this would create green profits and the market will do the energy switching for us.”

A bit dazed and tired, we leave wondering what will transpire in the last week coming up. Will the rich countries provide help to the poorer countries? Is it true that finally getting all nations committed to act is the success we have waited 20 futile years to achieve? Or, is a conference that does not raise the carbon price a disaster? We hope for a good week coming up.

Roy Wehrle of Springfield is a longtime environmentalist and professor emeritus in economics at UIS.