Copenhagen: The key players and how they rated

The agreement brokered by Barack Obama has faced international criticism from all sides, but most participants are already back home trying to portray it as a national political victory

Suzanne Goldenberg in Copenhagen, Toby Helm and John Vidal
The Observer, Sunday 20 December 2009
Barack Obama
The last time Barack Obama took a chance on Copenhagen it ended in abject humiliation.
The president hopped on a flight to the Danish capital to join a campaign by Oprah Winfrey and his wife, Michelle, to try to win Chicago the right to host the 2016 Olympic Games. But the Obamas' reliance on their high-voltage star power fell flat.
The International Olympic Committee eliminated Chicago in the first round of voting. When Obama returned to Washington, Republicans accused him of diminishing the office of president, and using up too much American political capital on such a frivolous matter.
On this return visit, the president did rather better. He flew home into a winter snowstorm in Washington able to claim that – after two years of negotiations had ended in deadlock – he had persuaded the world's biggest producers of greenhouse gases to act on global warming.
Environmentalists denounced the deal as a sham; and even Obama described its achievements as "modest". As he told a press conference on Friday night, holding out for a better deal might have meant no deal: "There might be such frustration and cynicism that, rather than taking one step forward, we ended up taking two steps back."
The White House will be able to spin Obama's efforts into a portrait of muscular diplomacy. His speech to the summit, in which he sourly noted the distance that remained to a deal, showed the president was prepared to come down hard against political opponents – a capability that has not been in full view in Washington.
That could help blunt Republican claims that the president – once again – gambled and lost at Copenhagen, and weakened America on the international stage. For Democrats, the weakness of the Copenhagen deal may be something of a relief. Obama did not commit America to any new action, giving them additional wriggle room to frame climate legislation with a strong chance of being passed in the Senate.
The deal that emerged in Copenhagen allows Obama to claim that he got China to meet America's demand that it provide accountability of its actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The issue had been one of the biggest sticking points in negotiations, and getting some elements of a compromise from China was crucial to Obama's efforts to get the legislation through the Senate.
Republican and Democratic senators from Midwest manufacturing states have been adamant that any deal should not give a competitive advantage to Chinese and Indian industry.
As they returned home on Air Force One, White House officials gave a detailed briefing on how Obama worked his way around a Chinese protocol officer who he thought was getting in the way of his meeting with Wen Jiabao. They also suggested the president had walked uninvited into a meeting of China, India, Brazil, and South Africa. The White House had previously thought the meeting would be a one-on-one between Wen and Obama.
"The only surprise we had, in all honesty, was… that in that room wasn't just the Chinese having a meeting… but in fact all four countries that we had been trying to arrange meetings with," the White House official said. "The president's viewpoint is: I wanted to see them all, and now is our chance."
Obama's deal does not, of course, come close to what science says must be done on global warming, and falls far short of the UN's ambitions. It was widely condemned by African and even European officials as soon as Obama left the conference centre – and predictably by Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. "We will reject any document Obama tries to slide over the top," he said.
But the huge shortfalls, and the grumblings of African countries, are not going to matter as much in Washington as the fact that Obama can claim that he went face to face with China – and won.
Suzanne Goldenberg
Gordon BrownMiliband's late-night dash helped avert a conference crisis
An exhausted Ed Miliband was in his pyjamas and about to get into bed at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Copenhagen when he made a final check call to an official at 4am. The climate change secretary could not believe what he heard.
After two weeks of summitry and years of preparation, an accord had finally been agreed by 30 countries, including the UK and US. Now it just had to be ratified by the full 192 nations present to gain formal UN status. It looked like a formality — far from perfect, but it was something for leaders across the globe to take home.
However, the official told Miliband that five countries – Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Sudan and Saudi Arabia – were cutting up rough and saying they would veto a deal. The whole summit could end in complete failure.
Miliband tore back to the conference centre and entered the meeting to hear the Sudanese official Lumumba Stanislas Dia-ping comparing the agreement to the Holocaust. The pact, he said, was "a solution based on values, the very same values in our opinion that funnelled six million people in Europe into furnaces". It "asked Africa to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries".
Delegates from a number of western countries quickly took to the floor to denounce the Sudanese delegate's references as offensive, among them Miliband, who is Jewish. It was a "disgusting comparison" which he said "should offend people across this conference whatever background they come from".
Officials in Copenhagen said Miliband, as much as anyone, helped to rescue the meeting from potential disaster by his intervention. Certainly, few governments had been as intensely and closely involved in the Copenhagen negotiations for the past few months as the British one, with Gordon Brown and Miliband taking the lead.
For Brown, who is desperate to portray himself as a global statesman, a father figure of world politics following his success in leading the global rescue of the banking system last year, Copenhagen was a perfect chance. He had been the first to propose the idea of a global fund to help developing countries obtain new clean energy technology and protect their peoples from the worst ravages of climate change. Brown devised the idea that industrialised countries set up a $100bn climate fund for developing countries, a plan now enshrined in the Copenhagen deal.
The UK government also championed turning Copenhagen into a fully-fledged summit of prime ministers and presidents, which Barack Obama would have little option but to attend.
Miliband had turned up the rhetoric in the week's before Copenhagen, warning in an interview with the Observer a fortnight ago that the consequence of failure would be "scary" in terms of the effect on the environment. There would be more floods like those in Cumbria, rising sea levels, and disastrous economic consequences as the world tried to contain the problems in future. He said "children will hold us in contempt" if we failed. So if he and the prime minister had to return to the UK empty-handed, the failure would have been hugely politically damaging.
Last night after returning, Miliband maintained that although he would have preferred a legally binding accord, there was much in the agreement that represented significant progress. "There is a danger of too much negativity," he said. "There are important things in this agreement, including on carbon emissions, which is on course towards two degrees, and on the finance. We recognise there could have been more ambition in parts of this agreement. Therefore we have to drive forward as hard as we can towards both a legally binding treaty and that ambition."
Unfortunately for Brown he did not receive a name check from Obama in his roll call of those to be thanked for their efforts to reach a deal. But the upside was that, thanks in part to his climate change secretary, there were at least some fruits of their late night labours to talk about on return.
Toby Helm
ChinaPromise that can't be proved
Barack Obama was not the only world leader prepared to play hardball at the conference, as China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, also demonstrated that he could withstand pressure from the international community.
Although China, in signing the deal, commits for the first time to curbing the rate of growth of its emissions, Wen can claim that he safeguarded the country's economic future.
China fought hard against strong pressure from America to submit to an international regime that would monitor if it was indeed cutting emissions as promised.
When Obama said China's stand on accountability would consign any deal to "empty words on a page", Wen walked out of the conference centre and went back to his hotel.
He later delivered an additional snub by sending a protocol officer to talk to Obama.
Suzanne Goldenberg
The EUNightmare avoided – but not embarrassment
Europe came to Copenhagen as the bloc that potentially stood to lose the most. The fear was that the US and other countries would refuse to cut their emissions further, but the EU would be forced by public pressure, or by the US , to cut from 20% to 30%, as it had promised to do if there was an ambitious deal.
This would leave it carrying most of the cuts and economically compromised.
The EU need not have worried. No country forced its hand on emission cuts in the negotiations, and it was itself comprehensively split, with countries such as Poland and even Germany reportedly blocking moves by Britain and others to put the cuts on the table.
One European country that played a key role was Denmark, the host, but this turned out to be an embarrassment.
Connie Hedegaard, the Danish climate minister, started well but was forced at the start of week two to step down in favour of the Danish prime minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, officially because it would be inappropriate for a mere climate minister to meet and greet world leaders. But it was an open secret that she was at odds with her leader and the rich countries preferred their own man.
Then Lars Løkke Rasmussen proved to be out of his depth at this level of politics. He, too, was forced to step down, probably by the UK, Australia, Canada and others.
Denmark also gave the world the "Danish text", a semi-secret set of proposals prepared with the rich countries. to be pushed for at the end of the talks. It was leaked to the Guardian on day two, and from then on the fight between rich and poor countries was furious.
John Vidal
AfricaBold nations wield their new power
The talks saw Africa assert itself on the world stage. The poorest and climatically most vulnerable continent has the most to lose from temperature increases and formed its own negotiating group for the first time.
Led by President Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, it stunned France, Britain and other rich nations last month by unexpectedly walking out of a preparatory UN climate conference meeting in Barcelona. The carefully planned move forced the UN into giving Africa and the concerns of the poorest more negotiating time.
Africa came to Copenhagen emboldened and, with the backing of international environment and development groups, staked out the moral high ground. By demanding the deepest emission cuts from the rich, and stoutly defending the Kyoto protocol – the only legal agreement that forces such countries to cut emissions – it was for once at the dead centre of global politics.
But Africa also has added clout in climate politics because of its close and growing links with China, the world's biggest producer of emissions. China has invested more than any other country in Africa's metals, oil and forests, and it now has more allies there than in most other continents.
Just as the US used Britain and its friends to make its arguments at Copenhagen, so China used Africa. But it worked both ways: in an astonishingly bold move, it seems that Africa at one point threatened to withhold its resources from China if it joined other countries in trying to abandon the Kyoto protocol.
But the continent also threw up one of the most interesting new figures on the world stage. Lumumba Di-aping, the Sudanese ambassador to New York, is a McKinsey and Oxford-trained radical economist who not only matched the media spin of western countries, but was partly behind George Soros's plan to use hundreds of billions of dollars of IMF special drawing rights to fund the financial deal.
In the end, the west exerted its traditional influence in Africa. President Meles was courted strongly by presidents Sarkozy, Brown and Obama in the days before the world leaders met, to try to bring Africa aboard the west's deal.
Meles proposed that developing countries accept $100bn a year – a remarkably similar sum to what the west had suggested. The accusations soon flew that Ethiopia had been bought and Meles was immediately slapped down by his peers.
Africa ended the talks divided, but knowing that it now plays a far more important role in the new politics of climate change.
John Vidal