Flopenhagen...worse than useless...The Copenhagen Discord...a suicide pact...a failure.

A meaningful agreement...an important first step...better than nothing...a breakthrough...

It's safe to say that reaction to the surprising outcome of COP15--the Copenhagen Accord--have been all over the map. After two weeks of exhausting negotiations, capped off by a sleepless 48-hours, it's also safe to say that most observers and advocates don't quite have their heads around what exactly happened. I certainly don't.

So before I sit down and sift through dozens of policy analyses, hours of recorded interviews, more hours of streaming video from overnight negotiating sessions that I first watched with lead eyelids and a
nodding head, and a couple score of newspaper articles from well-connected journalists, here are some random thoughts and observations from my couple of weeks in Copenhagen. (And please pardon any typos and run-ons--the two long, difficult weeks of negotiations were punctuated by a nearly 24-hour long, difficult journey back home, complete with two major snowstorms.)

Without further adieu, my not-so-deep thoughts:

Expectations for COP15 were way, way too high. We're all guilty of this to some
degree. I certainly am. (More than once I've referred to COP15 as the most important international meeting since World War II.) We all hoped against hope that leaders would recognize and heed the science and the
science alone, and that they'd step above political realities to make massive change. Of course, political realities are still realities, and in many ways the conference was doomed to failure before it even started.

Related: Surely we have to recognize a failure, but I'd argue that it didn't occur in Copenhagen. For two years now parties have been navigating the Bali Action Plan, a roadmap for a successful, binding outcome in Copenhagen, negotiating "full time" for the past year. Yet when delegates arrived in Copenhagen, they were still working off a couple of ridiculously loose draft texts that weren't anywhere close to compromise. Enormous rifts remained between the positions of industrialized nations, emerging economies like China and India, and the least developed countries most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. There was literally no way these vast and numerous gaps could be smoothed over in 12 short days of negotiating. If you want to call something a failure, I'd suggest pointing your blame at the lack of movement over the 11 months leading up to COP15. If heads of state showed up at the end of the second week with a handful of essential tripping points to hammer out, a better deal could've been had. But the state of the talks upon arrival in Copenhagen didn't give it a chance.

Also related: They created a circus out of COP15, and it nearly ruined everything. Blame the Danish government. They've been pushing this meeting hard as the time the world will solve climate change. They rolled out, with deep-pocketed multinational corporate sponsors, the Hopenhagen campaign. They accredited more than 45,000 people for a venue with a capacity of 15,000, ensuring that many would be left stuck out (quite literally) in the cold, and inviting the inevitable frustration and fury of those left out. They hosted dozens of side conferences and encouraging even more climate advocates to come to town, even bringing in a cruise ship to help accommodate another few thousand visitors.

I'm not sure that the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) will ever be equipped to tackle the climate challenge. The body's gross inefficiencies, endless bureaucracy, and infuriating lack of urgency make for a very slow process. (It took five years to get from Rio to the Kyoto Protocol, remember, and then another seven years before the KP went into force.) Climate science doesn't give us too much time to spare. Also, the stubborn dependence on consensus of all 193 parties means that any decision is necessarily a "lowest common denominator" type of solution. Considering the wild divergent self-interests of sovereign nations, anything that Saudi Arabia, Tuvalu, China and the United States are going to agree on doesn't have a great chance of
being all that constructive.

The U.S. and Europe will scapegoat China. Most international NGOs will scapegoat the U.S. The least developed countries will spread their scapegoating around on both sides.

Copenhagen might well be remembered not only for the symbolic progress on climate change, but also as the opening act of a new political world order, one where the U.S. and China share the responsibilities, benefits, and burdens of charting the world's course from everything from trade to nuclear proliferation to financial systems to climate. Europe was largely left on the sidelines during the crucial final days of the talks. In the end, it came down to the two superpowers representing the broader interests of their sides of the debate.

Civil society is (rightly) outraged after being essentially shut out of the last couple of days of the talks. But NGOs and observer organizations might need to rethink their strategy going forward. After the UN's embarrassing handling of civil society--over the top security measures brought down on observer orgs allegedly as a response to "uncivil" behavior--it's hard to imagine any COP going forward with as much access and as widespread accreditation as NGOs have grown used to. This will be a bad thing for the least-developed and most vulnerable nations, which are poorly represented in these talks by official delegations, and which rely on civil society to amplify their voice.

We begged and pleaded and shouted for Obama and other heads of state to come, and then booed, hissed and moaned when the resulting security concerns kept us out of their meetings. Be careful what you wish for. 

Copenhagen is a lovely city. Surely even lovelier when it's light for more than five hours a day.

The "deal"--the Copenhagen Accord--is exactly what everyone says it is. It's too weak. It's toothless. It's not worth the paper it's written on. It guarantees nothing. But it also really is an incredible accomplishment. That the United States hammered it out with emerging developing economies China, India, Brazil and South Africa, and then had to "sell it" to the Europeans and other industrialized countries, is a major shift.

For more than years, the developed world has been trying to get China and India to agree to some sort of transparency. To accept some form of MRV (measurement, reporting, and verification of their claimed emissions reductions). For the first time, they've shown some degree of compromise. This is huge.

Copenhagen was a failure, yet not a collapse. It's much, much less than we hoped for, and this "first step" is many, many years too late, but the Copenhagen Accord does create the political context and establishes the contours for a real, fair, ambitious and binding agreement.

A more thorough and thoughtful breakdown to soon follow.