So it turns out that not even President Obama could deliver magic ponies and glitter to the snafu'd Copenhagen climate talks.
The lackluster, non-binding "Copenhagen Accord" that emerged from the two-week meeting has triggered bright red rage from 350.org founder and enviro-writer-activist Bill McKibben. A sample quote: "The president has wrecked the UN and he's wrecked the possibility of a tough plan to control global warming."
Greenpeace International, Friends of the Earth and Oxfam International were among the other non-governmental organizations denouncing what's been called "flopenhagen."
Naomi Klein has no kind words in The Nation for the president. "I understand all the arguments about not promising what he can't deliver," she writes, "about the dysfunction of the U.S. Senate, about the art of the possible. But spare me the lecture about how little power poor Obama has."
Not every climate activist, though, has bought into the "blame Obama" meme. In his open letter to 350.org's McKibben, youth activist Terry Norris at It's Getting Hot in Here says that it's wrong and counterproductive to blame President Obama for Copenhagen's disappointments or shortcomings:
"The failure at Copenhagen is not the Obama administration’s fault, nor that of any single leader or country. Rather it is primarily the result of a flawed UNFCCC framework, which relies on outdated distinctions between 'developed' and 'developing' countries and fails to focus on negotiations between major polluters. Most problematic, it depends on the establishment of abstract and 'legally-binding' emissions reduction targets, instead of the immediate government investments we need to develop and deploy low-carbon energy and efficiency technologies."
"Why Is Everyone So Pissed With Obama?" asks Russ Walker in Grist. "Our disappointment in Obama is for the most part unrealistic. The European reporters I met wanted Obama to lead their nations -- lead the world -- when in reality he leads a country whose progress on climate change is many steps behind the developed world."
Then there are those who think that Copenhagen was actually a success -- or at least an important step on the way toward one. (For reaction from NRDC's experts, see the Switchboard blog.)
Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection is indicative of the brighter green "good first step" optimism expressed by more moderate groups: "President Obama [has] laid a clear path for America to join an historic international endeavor and move boldly forward towards a 21st century clean energy future and a global response to the climate crisis."
The Sierra Club's Carl Pope takes a constructive approach with his half-dozen "Lessons from Denmark," including an examination of the distrust that pervaded the negotiations:
"The striking and hopeful thing about the speeches given by the leaders of the major carbon-emitting nations was the firmness with which almost all of them reiterated their unilateral commitment to making significant, if inadequate, cuts in emissions. Not only the U.S., Europe, China, and India but also virtually every other nation that is a significant source of emissions promised to act.
"Equally striking (but depressing) was their unwillingness or inability to transform these individual intentions into a robust collective response.
"... Brazil's President Lula da Silva [said] that Copenhagen frustrated him because it reminded him of his experiences as a labor negotiator. (Lula was the one major leader who broke new ground and made new promises. One reason for the negative reaction to President Obama's speech was that it followed Lula's extraordinarily generous intervention.)
"The next round of negotiations must focus like a laser on solving the problem of distrust."
According to some assessments, Obama got the next best thing to a real deal at Copenhagen.
"President Obama may have improved his chances for passing global warming legislation in the Senate by forging an interim international agreement here that puts both rich and poor countries on a path to curtail greenhouse gas emissions," reported Darren Samuelsohn for Climatewire.
The specter of an unfettered China out-competing a carbon-constrained United States in the global economy has helped undermine policy reforms for more than a decade. Chinese Premier Wu Jintao's nods to both cutting emissions and allowing some sort of international monitoring (joined by Brazil, India, and South Africa) may deal a significant blow to senators intent on playing the "China card" in upcoming climate and energy bill debates.
Progressive policy wonk Daniel J. Weiss agrees, writing on Climate Progress that "this agreement should quell some senators’ uncertainty about China, India and other developing nations’ level and transparency of pollution reductions. These concerns have been a major reason that some senators from Midwestern states were reluctant to support domestic global warming legislation"
In "Copenhagen Decoded," Kate Sheppard (one of my Copenhagen apartment-mates) offers a good, dispassionate write-up of the climate talks from soup to nuts for Mother Jones.
Whatever your thoughts on the Copenhagen outcome, it doesn't end here. Coming in 2010: The road to Mexico City and the 16th global conference to deal with climate change.
Image: Ice bear sculpture on display in a Copenhagen square. During the two weeks that the climate talks took place, the ice melted away to reveal an armature evoking the skeleton of a polar bear. Credit: Emily Gertz
Dear Emily,
Some day soon, I hope you and other splendid commentators will find adequate ways to directly acknowledge the global challenges of our times by helping us "connect the dots" between human overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities on one hand and climate destabilization, natural resource dissipation and and environmental degradation on the other.
It seems to me that any "truth" about Earth's ecology and climate science need to be coupled with the best available science about human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of our planetary home.
When the moment of 'throwing out life preservers' occurs, it will probably be too late for human action to do anything meaningful about the human-forced global threats that once loomed ominously before the human family. Time will have been wasted. We will have been fiddlin' while Earth's environs were destroyed for human habitation and its resources were being recklessly depleted. Father Greed will have effectively ravaged Mother Nature. Although global threats had called out to leaders for global interventions, there were no transformational leaders (except Barack Obama) and international institutions (including the United Nations) empowered with adequate authority to promote necessary change.
At bottom, while there was still time to make a difference, many too many leading environmentalists, politicians, economic powerbrokers, talking heads in the mass media and other public opinion shapers colluded in stony silence and did not speak out loudly and clearly about the colossal threat that is posed to the family of humanity by the gigantic scale and skyrocketing growth of human population numbers now overspreading the surface of Earth.
Threats to human wellbeing and environmental health cannot be reasonably addressed and sensibly overcome until the root causes of the threats are acknowledged, validated by science, and widely shared in the human community, I suppose.
Very best regards,
Steve
Steve, I'd say that there's plenty of information out there establishing the links between over-consumption and environmental degradation.
Some countries and peoples simply have more will to act on that knowledge than others. Denmark -- lots of will. USA -- not so much.
Too many so-called leaders are engaging in too much happy talk, posing before too many cameras, and deceiving many too many people. Nero is reported to have behaved similarly by putting on a show: fiddlin' while Rome burned. Leaders in our time have adopted the ruinous strategy of Nero.
If only the human community could become as deeply curious and openly communicative about what the human species is doing in the world we inhabit as we are about the activities of wealthy and powerful people. Formidable human-induced global threats to human wellbeing and environmental health are just as evident as the conspicuous behaviors of the most greedy among us. To be a species with such remarkable self-consciousness, intelligence and other splendid gifts and to do no better than we are doing now is a source of deep sadness and occasional outbreaks of passionate intensity (likely signifying nothing).
Still I believe in remaining engaged in this worthwhile struggle, one in which so many human beings with feet of clay have been involved for a lifetime. For me, the first fifty years of life were lived, as you might imagine, as if in a dream world, the one devised by the greed-mongering Masters of the Universe among us. I had no awareness that a single adamant generation would irreversibly degrade Earth's environs, recklessly dissipate its limited resources, relentlessly diminish its biodiversity, destabilize its climate and threaten the very future of children everywhere.
At least we can speak out loudly, clearly and often about these unfortunate greed-driven circumstances, even though they are discomforting and unwelcome, and in the process educate one another. Like many in the OnEarth community have already reported, I do not have answers to forbidding questions related to the patently unsustainable 'trajectory' of human civilization in its present, colossally expansive form; but it seems our conscious denial of, and willful refusal to openly acknowledge, "what could somehow be real" means that the requirements of practical "reality" cannot be reasonably addressed and sensibly overcome. A colossal ecological wreckage of some unimaginable sort is likely to be the end result of our abject failure, I suppose, to respond courageously and ably to the looming global challenges that appear to have emerged robustly and converged rapidly in our time.