Copenhagen summit ends with feeble climate deal (non-binding)

[IndianaGreen]

Copenhagen summit ends with feeble climate deal

Agreement 'not sufficient to combat the threat of climate change' concedes US official

Live blog here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/dec/18/copenhagen-climate-change-summit-liveblog

Full coverage here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/copenhagen

George Monbiot has been blogging from Copenhagen:

Copenhagen negotiators bicker and filibuster while the biosphere burns

George Monbiot despairs at the chaotic, disastrous denouement of a chaotic and disastrous climate summit

George Monbiot in Copenhagen
guardian.co.uk, Friday 18 December 2009 22.24 GMT

First they put the planet in square brackets, now they have deleted it from the text. At the end it was no longer about saving the biosphere: it was just a matter of saving face. As the talks melted down, everything that might have made a new treaty worthwhile was scratched out. Any deal would do, as long as the negotiators could pretend they have achieved something. A clearer and less destructive treaty than the text that emerged would be a sheaf of blank paper, which every negotiating party solemnly sits down to sign.

This was the chaotic, disastrous denouement of a chaotic and disastrous summit. The event has been attended by historic levels of incompetence. Delegates arriving from the tropics spent 10 hours queueing in sub-zero temperatures without shelter, food or drink, let alone any explanation or announcement, before being turned away. Some people fainted from exposure; it's surprising that no one died. The process of negotiation was just as obtuse: there was no evidence here of the innovative methods of dispute resolution developed recently by mediators and coaches, just the same old pig-headed wrestling.

Watching this stupid summit via webcam (I wasn't allowed in either), it struck me that the treaty-making system has scarcely changed in 130 years. There's a wider range of faces, fewer handlebar moustaches, frock coats or pickelhaubes, but otherwise, when the world's governments try to decide how to carve up the atmosphere, they might have been attending the conference of Berlin in 1884. It's as if democratisation and the flowering of civil society, advocacy and self-determination had never happened. Governments, whether elected or not, without reference to their own citizens let alone those of other nations, assert their right to draw lines across the global commons and decide who gets what. This is a scramble for the atmosphere comparable in style and intent to the scramble for Africa.

At no point has the injustice at the heart of multilateralism been addressed or even acknowledged: the interests of states and the interests of the world's people are not the same. Often they are diametrically opposed. In this case, most rich and rapidly developing states have sought through these talks to seize as great a chunk of the atmosphere for themselves as they can – to grab bigger rights to pollute than their competitors. The process couldn't have been better designed to produce the wrong results.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/18/copenhagen-negotiators-bicker-filibuster-biosphere

[lapfog_1]

1. Sounds just like HCR here in the Senate.

Watered down to the point of uselessness.

[kestrel91316]

2. Better half a loaf than none.

[IndianaGreen]

3. This is not even a slice of bread. It is non-binding and...

Obama is not even going to do anything as far as the US goes.

[kestrel91316]

4. Of course it's nonbinding. Obama can't sign a binding agreement, IIRC.

Congress has to approve it. THEN it's binding.

For now it's what they call a "tentative" agreement because of that.