Obama's climate accord fails the test [View All]

[IndianaGreen]

NBC's Andrea Mitchell just broke the news on the Rachel Maddow show that China sent a low level official as its representative to Copenhagen.

Obama's climate accord fails the test

Watered-down agreement follows day of bitter wrangling in Copenhagen

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor, in Copenhagen

Saturday, 19 December 2009

World leaders late last night agreed a hugely watered-down version of a new global pact on climate change, after an astonishing day of deadlock, disagreement, misunderstandings, walkouts and insults at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen.

The agreement, patched together after massive and rancorous divisions between the rich nations and the developing countries, especially America and China, was described as a "meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough" by the US President Barack Obama. However, a senior American official openly admitted it was not enough to combat the threat of a warming planet, saying merely: "It is a first step."

Known as the Copenhagen Accord, the new agreement falls massively short of the ambitions many people had centred on the two-week meeting in the Danish capital, in the hope of a major new effort to combat the global warming threat. Although in principle it commits – for the first time – all the countries of the world, including the developing countries, to cut their emissions of the greenhouse gases which are causing climate change, the accord is not legally binding, merely a political statement.

They key timetable for turning it into a legal instrument by this time next year, which is what the world desperately needs so that cuts in CO2 emissions really are carried out, was dropped from the text during the immensely difficult and seemingly-intractable talks which lasted all day and late into the evening. In effect, that makes it toothless. Mr Obama himself admitted that a binding deal would be "hard to achieve".

And although, again for the first time, the new accord set a target for the whole world to try to keep the expected rise in temperatures to below the danger threshold of C above the pre-industrial level, last night's final text dropped all reference to the individual targets for emission cuts which countries will have to take on, both in the medium and in the long-term. It is possible these may be inserted early next year – but without being legally binding, they are merely generalised aspirations.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/obamas-climate-accord-fails-the-test-1845090.html