Journalist Eric Reguly has been to several climate conferences and hopes Paris will make up for some lost time. Copenhagen was widely considered a "failure," and there are concerns being raised that Paris may go the same way. Listen to his interview with Piya Chattopadhyay on Cross Country Checkup here:

Piya Chattopadhyay: How are you doing?

Eric Reguly: I'm well. I'm excited about going to Paris. I covered Copenhagen--the big Copenhagen conference-- that was at the end of 2009. It was gruelling. It was an animal show. Nothing much got done. We're hoping Paris will make up from some lost time.

PC: Let's go back to well before Copenhagen. The Paris climate change conference comes 23 years after the Rio Earth Summit. So that was 1992. Really Rio was the beginning of the conference of the parties (COPs) summits. Copenhagen as you just cited there, Eric, didn't live up to a lot of people's expectations. Is this all hot air? Or is there a sense that this summit will accomplish something that others have not?

ER: I think it will and I'll tell you why. This time most of the work has been done. They flipped it around. They had all of the countries of the world submit proposals to reduce their emissions between now and 2030. Most countries have done that. Some were pretty aggressive. If I had to give a range, it'd be somewhere between 15-30 per cent for each of these countries. The heavy lifting has really been done on that front.

But could it still fall apart? Yes. Because there's one or two big issues that will be negotiated in Paris. One is: the financing. The developing world wants the rich world, including Canada, to pay $100 billion a year to help the developing world adapt to climate change. That money flow may not come and that is going to be a huge sticking point in the coming weeks.

PC: Yes, they have twelve days to hammer all this out. Let's talk about Canada, Eric. We know with Kyoto, Canada signed on then said, "Nope that's not going to happen." So what's our reputation coming into this conference?

ER: Oh, it's terrible. In 2009, in Copenhagen, Canada was the joke of the conference--it was the punching bag. Almost every day it won the Fossil of Day Award. It was famous--or infamous I should say--for blocking tactics. It didn't want to deal. Two years later, the government of Stephen Harper pulled Canada out of the Kyoto Accord--it was the first country in the world to do so.

There was a very good reason why Canada was blocking and it's because it has the oil sands industry in Alberta, which has become a huge emitter of greenhouse gases. And I think Stephen Harper just said, "Look we can't grow Canada's biggest industry and meet out climate change commitments so something's gotta go." So Kyoto went.

PC: You mentioned the oil sands and that's interesting because the Alberta government has this climate change strategy that it announced recently. Is that going to help Canada reposition itself? A new leader and a new plan of the province, which climate change advocates around the world are huge critics of.

ER: Yes to some degree. Justin Trudeau is making the right noises. The other day at the Malta Commonwealth Conference, he's offering to pay more money to the developing world. He's adding $2.6 billion on top of the $1.5 billion that's going to go to the developing world, it's about $4 billion in total. But, Piya, the numbers aren't working in his favour. Once this comes out in Paris, he may be in some trouble.

You're right. Alberta does have this new carbon plan but the carbon plan, even though it's much better than the old one which was nothing, still allows oil sands emissions to go up 40 per cent between now and 2030. Overall emissions from the province as a result will go up slightly between now and 2030. Whereas, the whole idea of Paris is to get emissions down rather than to let them rise slightly. So there, he's got a problem.

PC: Eric as you pack your bags to go to Paris. What for you would look like success coming out of this conference and what looks like failure to you?

ER: How these climate change summits work is that they're all or nothing. In other words, every country signs on or it's deemed a failure. That's why Copenhagen in 2009 was deemed a failure. There was sort of an accord between the top polluting countries but no deal for the poorer countries. It looks like we're going to get a global deal, that's a win, but as I mentioned before it's the financing -- the flow of money from the rich world to the poor world may be a deal breaker. $100 billion a year is what they want and that's a lot of money.

The other one is transparency. China for example says they're going to do this and that and cap our emissions for 2030, but how do we know they're actually going to do that. They don't want independent monitors to go in and verify this so transparency is going to be a huge issue there.