Inside the 7 December issue of The Guardian Weekly

As the world meets in Poland to hammer out a deal to make the 2015 Paris accord a reality - have we left it too late? Subscribe to The Guardian Weekly Two months ago, the UN's climate change panel warned that unless humanity takes drastic action, we will only have 12 years to save the planet from disaster. But will we? Representatives from almost 200 nations are currently meeting in the Polish coal-mining town of Katowice to try to turn the pledges made in Paris in 2015 into a political reality. There are, with children in Australia walking out of school to protest the climate inaction, signs of generational optimism. On the other hand, we have Donald Trump dismissing his own government's climate report, while the incoming Bolsonaro administration is refusing to host next year's climate talks in Brazil. There is still time to save the world but at the moment, Robin McKie writes, a climate catastrophe looks inevitable - and everywhere will be affected. With the White House actively uninterested in the process in Poland, a key role will fall to Obama's "climate diaspora" - a group of former state department climate officials now working in the private sector who are doing all they can to protect the goals agreed in Paris. In a fascinating piece, Karl Mathiesen profiles the likes of Sue Biniaz and Todd Stern, who are trying to save the Paris accord from their own president.As Emmanuel Macron sat with other G20 leaders in Buenos Aires, the group of tax protesters known as the gilets jaunes held a third weekend of demonstrations. The violence in France brought the government to crisis point. The battle with the "yellow vests" is the biggest challenge to Macron since he took office last May, writes our Paris correspondent Angelique Chrisafis. We also look at who the protesters are, what they want - and how French fuel costs (the catalyst for the uprising) compare to those in the rest of Europe. Elsewhere this week, there was a detente in the ongoing trade battle between the United States and China. Our economics editor Larry Elliott warns that, with protectionism playing well with US voters, carmakers shouldn't count their chickens. In Honduras, the killers of environmental activist Berta Cáceres were found guilty and, in Germany, a trio of candidates are lining up to replace Angela Merkel as leader of the Christian Democrats. In our culture pages, Hadley Freeman meets the world-conquering creator of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who's been practising his estuary English accent for Disney's reprise of Mary Poppins - and Ryan Gilbey looks at the legacies of two recently deceased filmmakers, Nicolas Roeg and Bernardo Bertolucci, and asks how they compare in modern eyes. Continue reading...