In April 2006, the cover of Time Magazine showed a stranded polar bear drifting on a tiny raft of ice with the accompanying headline reading,‘Be worried. Be very worried.’Even with the pertinent subject matter only being given in a tiny sub-heading, the readers would immediately recognize that this doomed creature stood iconically for what is perceived to be one of the greatest threats that mankind currently faces: global climate change. In December 2010, the global public encountered the polar bear again, but this time several thousand kilometers further south, on the beach of the seaside resort of Cancun, Mexico. There, an activist from the US non-governmental organization (NGO) Sierra Club was dressed as a dying bear to protest against the countries that have been allegedly obstructing ambitious efforts to fight climate change and especially to find a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol at the 16th Conference of Parties under the United Nations (UN) Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). These two encounters epitomize several of the peculiarities and intricacies of modern environmental politics. While the galvanizing image on the cover of Time Magazine stands for a tardy but nevertheless remarkable change in awareness and attitudes toward the issue of global warming by the US public, the uncanny activists’ plot on the beaches of Cancun substantiates the difficulties of reaching a political compromise in situations where political and economic stakes are high, where uncertainties are prevalent, and where fundamental values and moral commitments are in dispute. Both