What *Really* Happened in Copenhagen?

[villager]

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First, the 2 1/2 pages of diplomatic blather that the participating countries ultimately consented to “take note” of are completely self-contradictory, and commit no one to any specific actions to address the global climate crisis. There isn’t even a plan for moving UN-level negotiations forward. Friends of the Earth correctly described it as a “sham agreement,” British columnist George Monbiot called it an exercise in “saving face,” and former neoliberal shock doctor-turned-environmentalist Jeffrey Sachs termed it a farce. Long-time UN observer Martin Khor has pointed out that for a UN body to “take note” of a document means that not only was it not formally adopted, but it was not even “welcomed,” a common UN practice.

Second, the global divide between rich and poor has never been clearer, and those countries where people are already experiencing the droughts, floods, and the melting of glaciers that provide a vital source of freshwater expect to find themselves in increasingly desperate straits as the full effects of climate disruptions begin to emerge. Not to mention the small island nations that face near-certain annihilation as melting ice sheets bring rising seas, along with infiltrations of seawater into their scarce fresh water supplies. Especially despicable was the changing role of the governments of the rapidly developing “BASIC” countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China), who claim to speak for the poor – in their own countries and around the world – when it is convenient, but mainly seek to protect the expanding riches of their own well-entrenched elites.

Third, even the meager and contradictory progress of the past 17 years of global climate talks is now at risk, as is the flawed but relatively open and inclusive UN process. After the 2007 climate summit in Bali, Indonesia, the Bush administration tried to initiate an alternate track of negotiations on climate policy that involved only a select handful of the more compliant countries. That strategy failed, partly because its figurehead was George Bush. Now that the Obama administration has adopted essentially the same approach, with the full collaboration of the “BASICs,” the utterly substanceless “Copenhagen Accord” can be seen as this coercive strategy’s first diplomatic success.

As I wrote just as the Copenhagen meeting was getting underway (see my “Repackaging Copenhagen,” posted in early December), the US had planned for some months to attempt to replace the quaint notion of a comprehensive global climate agreement with a patchwork of informal, individual country commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and undertake other appropriate measures. If the Copenhagen document means anything at all, it establishes that process as a new global norm for implementing climate policy. Nothing is binding, and everything is voluntary, only to be “assessed” informally after another five years have passed. (Pages 4 and 5 of the “accord” actually consist of a pair of high school-caliber charts where countries are free to simply write in their voluntary emissions targets and other mitigation actions, nominally by the end of January.)

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http://www.counterpunch.org/tokar12232009.html

[Hekate]

1. For another point of view, see this stunning article about China's role in sabotaging the whole deal

This is a really grim account of China's role at the Copenhagen climate talks. The Chinese government is as aware as any other that climate change is real. But their goal is to make this China's Century, just as the 20th Century was America's Century. It has strong solar and wind industries, but it's booming growth is for now based on cheap coal, with all the pollution that entails.

It plans to be an uncontested superpower, and it was acting as such in Copenhagen.

The final paragraph says it all:
> Copenhagen was much worse than just another bad deal, because it illustrated a profound shift in global geopolitics. This is fast becoming China's century, yet its leadership has displayed that multilateral environmental governance is not only not a priority, but is viewed as a hindrance to the new superpower's freedom of action. I left Copenhagen more despondent than I have felt in a long time. After all the hope and all the hype, the mobilisation of thousands, a wave of optimism crashed against the rock of global power politics, fell back, and drained away.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/22/copenhagen-climate-change-mark-lynas

> How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room
Mark Lynas
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 December 2009 19.54 GMT

> Copenhagen was a disaster. That much is agreed. But the truth about what actually happened is in danger of being lost amid the spin and inevitable mutual recriminations. The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful "deal" so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen.

> China's strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world's poor once again. And sure enough, the aid agencies, civil society movements and environmental groups all took the bait. >snip<

> All very predictable, but the complete opposite of the truth. .... But I saw Obama fighting desperately to salvage a deal, and the Chinese delegate saying "no", over and over again. Monbiot even approvingly quoted the Sudanese delegate Lumumba Di-Aping, who denounced the Copenhagen accord as "a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries".

> Sudan behaves at the talks as a puppet of China; one of a number of countries that relieves the Chinese delegation of having to fight its battles in open sessions. It was a perfect stitch-up. China gutted the deal behind the scenes, and then left its proxies to savage it in public.

> Here's what actually went on late last Friday night, as heads of state from two dozen countries met behind closed doors. Obama was at the table for several hours, sitting between Gordon Brown and the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi. The Danish prime minister chaired, and on his right sat Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the UN. Probably only about 50 or 60 people, including the heads of state, were in the room. I was attached to one of the delegations, whose head of state was also present for most of the time.

> What I saw was profoundly shocking. The Chinese premier, Wen Jinbao, did not deign to attend the meetings personally, instead sending a second-tier official in the country's foreign ministry to sit opposite Obama himself. The diplomatic snub was obvious and brutal, as was the practical implication: several times during the session, the world's most powerful heads of state were forced to wait around as the Chinese delegate went off to make telephone calls to his "superiors". >snip<

Much more at link.

[villager]

3. China's not going to feel very "manifest destiny"-like when nature pushes back

...climates shift, crops don't come in, their billions want to be fed, etc..

It's the typical hubris of empire -- the false imagining that one is permanently exempt from all the rules and boundaries of the world...

[Hekate]

4. China has hubris aplenty, but also lots of smarts. They're working on damming two rivers...

... that water India/South Asia and diverting the flow back to China. Major rivers. One's the Brahmaputra, but I can't remember the name of the other one. This will be a complete disaster for everyone downstream, but China has always been the center of the Universe as far as the Chinese are concerned.

And a great deal of damage will be wrought...

Hekate

[Hekate]

2. Kick