The End of Copenhagen, and the beginning of Mexico City

Time to go home everybodyThere’s always next year. As the COP15 summit result is being largely hailed as either a failure or a very small success, all bleary jet-lagged eyes are turning toward 2010. This weekend the people at a U.N. climate meeting committed to attempt to complete the new global pact around climate change by the end of next year.

Reuters reprints a weird transcript they say was “code for the work of climate negotiators” "I have been given a note which I understand is the agreed text from the drafting group which looked at ... outcome of the work of the ad hoc working group on long-term cooperative action under the convention (on climate change)."

"The following changes are in my understanding those agreed in the drafting group. ... would read 'continue its work with a view to presenting the outcome of its work to the conference of the parties for adoption at its sixteenth session'."

And with that, the Copenhagen summit was done. There’s always next year.

So what did we walk away with?

In the end we have a commitment by industrialized nations to pay developing countries $100 billion to deal with the effects of climate change and a commitment on everyone’s part to keep temperature rise below 2 degrees Celcius. There was no commitment to a reduction included.

While many countries are calling out the treaty as totally worthless or well below expectations, I tend to side with Obama about one thing:

“Today we have made a meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough here in Copenhagen. For the first time in history, all major economies have come together to accept their responsibility to take action to confront the threat of climate change.”

It’s true- to get the U.S. in a deal at all is pretty impressive, and to get the U.S. and China to sign on to the same deal is even more impressive.

“Let's remember, a year ago nobody thought this sort of agreement was possible,” added Gordon Brown.

Exactly.

Hopefully everyone is serious that there is work to be done and they want to do it over the next year. I see a few scenarios:

1.    Obama takes the momentum he is building and focuses his attention on leading the world into a new, more meaningful climate change pact after he gets done passing the healthcare bill here in the U.S. 25% chance of that happening.

2.    Everybody grumbles for a while and there is some kind of major backlash from developing nations who feel like they have been ignored. Something serious happens in the United Nations meeting sometime in the late spring that sparks a split and throws the world into diplomatic chaos. 50% chance of that happening.

3.    Everybody spends the year focusing on other things and about a month before Mexico City we get a repeat of the same performance where everyone is just trying to rush to talk to everyone else and nothing much is happening- We end up with another sub-par agreement that settles in to everybody’s consciousness with the message that we are not going to make any big, dramatic strides: 75% chance of that happening.

We’ll see.

This progress did not come easily and we know this progress alone is not enough ... We've come a long way but we have much further to go,” said Obama. Indeed.

Photo Credit: Hunter-Desportes (via Flickr under Creative Commons License)