It had been billed and hyped as the "Seal the Deal" summit, a conference that would produce a binding global agreement on greenhouse gases to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The United States had remained the only major nation that refused to ratify the treaty, and hopes were high in environmentalist circles that President Barack Obama would change that by bringing the United States on board the newer, tougher treaty expected to come out of Copenhagen.
However, even before the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) got formally underway in Denmark on December 7, it had become obvious that wheels were coming off the UN’s global-warming bandwagon. Negotiators in Copenhagen had been following what is known in UN parlance as the "Bali roadmap," a reference to the plan for a Kyoto replacement agreed upon at the 2007 UN Climate Conference in Bali, Indonesia.
But the road from Bali has been bumpy and filled with gaping potholes. After two years of haggling, major issues remained unresolved, and by mid November, with the Copenhagen summit only three weeks away, President Obama was acknowledging that time had run out and hopes for a binding treaty would have to wait until the 2010 Climate Conference in Mexico City. Nevertheless, he agreed to make an appearance at Copenhagen to help the process along.
As negotiations entered the second week at Copenhagen’s Bella Center, a cloud of pessimism hung over the conference site. News stories and editorials highlighted the clashes between developed and developing countries and the still-raging conflicts over emission targets, funding, monitoring, and enforcement. Inside Bella Center, much of the talk among delegates, journalists, and representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) centered on whether Obama could "save" the agreement. The World Wildlife Fund, one of the behemoths of the Big Green lobby, signaled its messianic view of the new President’s mission in its guide to Copenhagen, "The New Climate Deal," with a woodcut print image of Obama labeled "The New HOPE."
Although he had postponed his appearance at Copenhagen from December 8 to December 18 in order to provide a final boost to the beleaguered talks at the culmination of the conference, Obama’s international "star power" – even with its recent Nobel Prize supercharge – couldn’t deliver the goods. After landing in Denmark at 8:19 a.m. on Friday, December 18, President Obama was expected to address the conference within the hour. But the morning wore on with no sign of the savior, and many in the massive media pool delivered minute-by-minute reports featuring rumors and speculations as to where he was and what he was doing. With little else to report on, many journalists also engaged in remote psychoanalysis, offering their opinions of the supposed significance of the facial expressions and body language of various politicians and UN officials.
Finally, at 11:32 a.m., President Obama appeared at the podium of the Plenary Session hall to deliver a brief, anti-climactic speech that left most of the faithful -disappointed.
Reiterating the dire claims of other summit participants, he asserted that "climate change poses a grave and growing danger to our people." He continued:
This is not fiction, this is science. Unchecked, climate change will pose unacceptable risks to our security, our economies, and our planet. That much we know…. There is no time to waste.
"I’m confident," Obama said, "that America will fulfill the commitments that we have made: cutting our emissions in the range of 17 percent by 2020, and by more than 80 percent by 2050 in line with final legislation." He also confirmed the pledge made earlier in the conference by his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, that the United States would "engage in a global effort to mobilize $100 billion" annually in financing for climate-related aid to developing countries.
But this clearly fell short of the grand scheme envisioned by the apostles of doom who demanded a "legally binding" document with emission reduction targets that supposedly would hold additional global warming to less than two degrees centigrade. The Guardian, one of Europe’s loudest sirens of climate alarmism, and usually favorable toward Obama, noted: "For all his usual fine words, he seemed to [be] admitting defeat on the prospects for a meaningful deal, and there were no new announcements."
Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez described Obama’s speech as "ridiculous," and called Obama’s initial offer of a $10 billion fund for poor countries "a joke."
Andy Atkins, executive director of Friends of the Earth, stated: "Obama has deeply disappointed not just those listening to his speech at the UN talks – he has disappointed the whole world."
Tim Jones, a spokesman for the World Development Movement, said of Obama’s speech: "The President said he came to act, but showed little evidence of doing so…. If America has really made its choice, it is a choice that condemns hundreds of millions of people to climate-change disaster."
Phil Radford, executive director of Greenpeace, U.S., declared: "The world was waiting for the spirit of yes we can, but all we got was my way or the highway. He [Obama] crossed an ocean to tell the world he has nothing new to offer, then he said take it or leave it…. He now risks being branded as the man who killed Copenhagen."
Throughout the day reports and rumors circulated concerning Obama’s whereabouts and activities. Newsweek’s Daniel Stone reported in his conference blog at 5:51 p.m. (Copenhagen time) on a secret meeting that had been "crashed" by Obama ("Obama Dramatically Interrupts Meeting, Negotiators Reach Final Agreement")
This is Stone’s rendition of the event:
Late in the afternoon on Friday, with the clock ticking down to zero, a rather dramatic scene unfolded that surprised even several top leaders at the climate negotiations in Copenhagen. In a secret meeting between Chinese, Indian, and Brazilian heads of state, the door swung open revealing President Obama, who hadn’t been invited but had arrived to crash the meeting. Several diplomats protested the intrusion, but Obama simply informed them he wouldn’t accept them negotiating in secret. He sat down and started talking.
Before the Newsweek account of the drama had hit the Internet, a Brazilian television correspondent sitting across the table from your reporter had given THE NEW AMERICAN essentially the same story, which he had just received from the Brazilian Environmental Minister who had come directly from the meeting. Brazil’s President Lula da Silva and others at the meeting were reportedly angered by Obama’s invasion and commandeering of the meeting
"The result of that discussion," said Stone, "is the outcome of the Copenhagen climate talks – a political agreement that gets something on paper but lacks several of the components that many had expected to be finalized at the meeting." Exactly what had been committed to paper and who had agreed to it remained the subject of rumor and confusion for hours to come. Indeed, calling it a "political agreement" at all was a stretch, since every few moments a new report surfaced of a head of state or political negotiator who was denouncing the text, as well as the process that produced it, as unacceptable. Most vociferous in decrying the newly announced accord was Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, chief climate negotiator for the 130-nation bloc of developing nations known as the G77 (named for the Group of 77 nations that founded it).
The secret dealings by the major powers and the announcement of a "global" agreement restarted recriminations from the previous week by Di-Aping and other G77 voices over the leaked secret "Danish text" of a Copenhagen agreement that had been stitched together by Denmark, the United Kingdom, the United States, and a few others. Di-Aping condemned the Danish text in the harshest of terms – calling it a "suicide pact" and "climate fascism" that would mean "certain death for Africa."
Now the final agreement text was coming in for similar treatment. For several hours rumors continued to swirl around Bella Center – some alleging President Obama was still on site engaged in further negotiations, others reporting that he had been spotted slipping out via a rear door. Finally, at around 9:30 p.m., the live webcast monitors in the Media Center, where several thousand journalists were ensconced, as well as monitors throughout the entire Bella Center, began streaming President Obama’s long-delayed statement and press conference Q & A.
Attempting to put the best spin on the accord, Obama called the document a "meaningful and unprecedented" agreement, a "first step" that would mark "the beginning of a new era of international action."
Condemnations were not slow in coming. "Copenhagen has been an abject failure," declared Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International. "We are disgusted by the failure of rich countries to commit to the emissions reductions they know are needed, especially the U.S., which is the world’s largest historical emitter of greenhouse gasses…. This is effectively a death sentence for many in some of the world’s most vulnerable countries."
"Climategate" and the Economy Overtake Warming Hysteria
But the momentum for a global agreement on climate change, propelled by a decades-long campaign of pseudo-science and fright-peddling, has crested; millions of people who had previously bought in to the seemingly universal appeals for urgent global action to save the planet are now cooling to global-warming hysteria. A series of opinion polls over the past year – by Pew Research and Rasmussen – indicate that concern over human-caused climate change has taken a nosedive. This supposed "dire threat to the planet," it seems, rates dead last among voters on a list of top political and economic concerns.
