After Copenhagen, Now What?

After two weeks observing the climate negotiations in Copenhagen, I’ve taken my time reacting to the outcome. There has been a great deal to digest. But as the dust begins to settle, it’s clear Copenhagen has spawned two principal conversations around the world.

The first is a postmortem on what happened, or didn’t happen, at COP15, the long-anticipated United Nations 15th Conference of the Parties.

The second conversation is asking, “What now?”

The postmortem is producing widely varied opinions. President Obama, who brokered a non-binding, three-page Copenhagen Accord among a handful of countries, called the deal “meaningful and unprecedented”.

The Center for American Progress, a progressive Washington think-tank close to the Obama Administration, said Copenhagen produced “numerous notable achievements and meaningful insights into how the United States can gain from leading the world toward a new international clean-energy agreement.”

Others reacted with anger and disappointment that a far more concrete and binding commitment had not resulted from the years of international negotiations that were supposed to culminate with a treaty at Copenhagen. President Obama and a few other world leaders tried to lower expectations earlier this year, but they didn’t lower them enough.

Bill McKibben, the prolific environmental writer who founded 350.org and organized the largest worldwide climate demonstration in history last fall, assessed COP15 this way:

"It’s possible that human beings will simply never be able to figure out how to bring global warming under control — that having been warned about the greatest danger we ever faced, we simply won’t take significant action to prevent it.

"That’s the unavoidable conclusion of the conference that staggered to a close in the early hours of Saturday morning in Copenhagen. It was a train wreck, but a fascinating one, revealing an enormous amount about the structure of the globe."

One exhausted State Department official who worked tirelessly for months in negotiations leading up to COP15 explained that Obama did not show up in Copenhagen to end the deadlock there with a Hail Mary pass. Instead, this insider said, Obama rushed up the middle for some tough yards and got a first down.

But today, the end-zone seems farther away than ever. Signs are that COP15 drove nations apart rather than bringing them closer together on solutions to climate change. For example, Europe is blaming China and the United States for the lack of progress; China says the EU is trying to drive a wedge between nations; numerous accounts claim that China was the main obstructionist; and the president of Brazil is blaming Obama for not committing to more aggressive U.S. emission cuts.

After Obama took the podium to deliver his short speech to delegates in the final hours of COP-15, my first reaction was extreme disappointment, even anger, at the inadequacy of his message.

He and the United States are capable of much more than he offered. The speech could have been Obama’s moment, an historic point at which he turned the world away from its destructive path and toward a safer, more secure and prosperous century.

With the soul-stirring words of which he is capable, with unhesitating recognition of the United States’ responsibility to help poor nations, with strong commitments equal to the climate challenge and America’s moral obligation to address it, and by declaring an international race to the top of a new 21st Century economy, Obama could have transformed the emotional, polarized and calcified dynamic that had developed at COP-15 during the two weeks before he arrived.

Instead, as McKibben noted,