Friday 18 December 2009

BBC claims a deal has been done in Copenhagen

But its not a strong one. Looks like an agreement on a 2 degree target, some finance and monitoring with details filled in over next year. BBC reports Obama reaches a deal with China, India, South Africa...news conferences about to start
Diana

1 comment:

  1. Viewed from afar, the whole event has been subject to excrutiating and quite depressing media coverage. For me it is panning out as the greatest environmental disappointment of the decade - much hype, little action. Nobody, over the next few weeks and months, is going to look back on this as an environmental success story, surely?

    One seriously has to wonder why it is that so much political intransigence was brought to the meeting, and more of it was not dealt with beforehand, given that everybody knew the dates of the conference, and the importance of the event.

    I feel as though the focus now goes back to national and more local actions - and goodness knows how those will go, in an important country like China, which is still not prepared to be transparent in monitoring its own emissions, despite some good commitments to green technologies over the last 5 yrs.

    Of course there were exceptions to this, like REDD, and the last-minute half-measures Obama proposal, but the absence of a total shift in nations' attitudes to continued high emissions, or any real commitment to putting the industrial revolution to bed and onto a new renewables path, is pretty embarrassing.

    Down here in the S hemisphere we may start looking to an Asia-Pacific Climate Pact, but perhaps with diminished enthusiasm. Failures at Copenhagen will also scotch Australia's ET scheme, which was imperfect and a drop in the ocean, but may have actually delivered some reduction. The conservative opposition said last month they would commit to it afresh in 2010 only if there was a global agreement in Denmark. In many other countries, this same cat and mouse game was being played out - "we will commit to reductions only if there is global agreement in Copenhagen". Where does this leave us now?

    Simon Batterbury ex-ECI Fellow

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