I just watched President Obama on television. There will be no binding agreement coming out of Copenhagen, meaning that the conference failed. That’s to be celebrated, not because of anything personal, but because no deal is good for the country and good for the world. More details and analysis as we learn more. Meanwhile, POTUS is heading out of Dodge early, ironically, to beat a huge snowstorm at home.
Update: Here’s some news reportage. From the story:
President Barack Obama called it a “meaningful” beginning to a new global consensus toward limiting green house gas emissions, but acknowledged climate change talks failed to produce a “legally binding” pact and doing so any time soon would be “very hard. It’s going to be very hard and it’s going to take some time,” Obama said during a press conference here before he boarded Air Force One for the return flight to Washington - a journey precipitated by a massive D.C. snowstorm that required Obama to leave here before the loose accord is approved. “This is hard within countries. This is going to be even harder between countries.”
The agreement reached is not a treaty and has no internal or external enforcement mechanism. Each nation pledged to meet future pollution reduction targets and Obama said an international process he compared to the World Trade Organization will monitor compliance. Through satellite and other forms of monitoring, Obama said, nations will be able to judge each other’s follow-through.
And here’s the real killer:
Significantly, the nations here dropped a commitment previously held to pursue a legally binding pact in 2010
No deal now and no deal to make a binding deal next year.
Now that we haven’t been pushed off a cliff, we need to reopen the books and relook at the science—with no one excluded from the data or from participation in analysis.
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