If the criterion to judge progress is expectations, the prospects are poor. In early September, G20 Finance Ministers described prospects for 2015 as disappointing. We still face the prospect of competitive currency devaluations. Progress on Sovereign Debt restructuring is disappointing – the Greek case being a perfect example of a “snow plow” approach to avoid.

Even with heroic efforts, you cannot put lipstick on a pig. The Millennium Development Goals were a major boost, mobilizing attention and resources. The Post 2015 Development Goals are an unfortunate joke – 17 goals and 169 targets – and suggests the UN has no capacity to say “no”. If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. The result is that in effect we have no global goals.

The Addis Ababa Action Agenda is the empty result of the summer’s failed summit conference on Financing for Development, despite the previous year’s “hyped up rhetoric about its ambition”. Aldo Caliari, representing civil society’s views wrote, “We have identified more than 20 areas in which this outcome retrogresses over the previous Financing for Development Conference Outcomes from Doha and Monterrey—from inequality to universal services, including debt, taxation and many others.” He understates the failure.

Globally, there are too many constraints – inappropriate short time horizons, the “not in my backyard” syndrome and infinite capacity to delude ourselves. Governments adopted a 2 degree centigrade target, equating it to 450 ppm atmospheric CO2 concentration. In fact 450 ppm only provides a 50% probability of meeting the target – so as Bill McKibben has pointed out, we are playing Russian roulette with three bullets in six chambers. The Paris meeting will result is aspirational rhetoric and voluntary commitments, with zero likelihood of provision of the $100 billion per year promised at the 2009 Copenhagen conference. There is no prospect of meeting this target – five degrees Centigrade increase is more likely. The focus on inefficient fossil fuel subsidies would be more effective if the G20 published a report on their respective tax preferences subsidizing exploration for fossil fuels, in an era of “stranded assets”, where carbon in proven reserves exceed by at least a factor of five the emissions consistent with the two degree target.