Copenhagen climate conference: The grim meaning of 'meaningful'

[marmar]

from the Guardian UK:



Copenhagen climate conference: The grim meaning of 'meaningful'
The Guardian, Saturday 19 December 2009


Like businessmen who insist a deal is legit, politicians protesting they have done something "meaningful" arouse suspicions that the opposite is in fact true. And "meaningful" was about the best word the spin doctors could muster in respect of the agreement of sorts that was brokered in Copenhagen late last night.

The climate change summit had three big tickets on its agenda: emissions, financial assistance and the process going ahead. And on each of these counts the accord – which was effectively hammered out not by the whole conference, but rather by the US, India, China and South Africa – fell woefully short. There was no serious cementing of the positive noises on aid that had emerged earlier on in the week. On emissions, a clear-eyed vision for the distant future was rendered a pipe dream by outright fuzziness about the near term. And most alarmingly of all, there was no clear procedural roadmap to deliver the world from the impasse that this summit has landed it in. Outright failure to agree anything at all would have been very much worse, but that is about the best thing that can be said.

The course of the summit as a whole – which moved from bold rhetoric, through blame games to eventual grudging concessions – was neatly epitomised in Barack Obama's flying visit. The newly-crowned Nobel laureate opened his brief speech in near-identical terms to those we recently deployed – in common with 56 newspapers worldwide – in a shared editorial which called on global leaders to do the right thing.

Stating climate change was a frightening fact, the president pronounced his determination to act. Soon, however, he broke his own rhetorical spell by following his eloquent overture not with a magnanimous announcement, but with some none-too-subtle pointing of the finger at China. He may have been technically accurate in implying that it nowadays emitted more than the US, but this cheap point distracted from the reality that much of China's – in any case low – per-head emissions are incurred in serving western consumers. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/19/copenhagen-climate-change-conference-obama