A great step forward: Obama's verdict on climate change pact

President's intervention was failure, say critics
Ed Pilkington in New York
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 December 2009 20.49 GMT
Barack Obama returned to a snowbound Washington at the weekend clutching a deal that was cast as a step forward by his administration but decried as a waste of paper by critics on both sides of the climate change debate.
At the end of another of his interventions on the world stage that are becoming a hallmark of his presidency, Obama said the Copenhagen talks amounted to an "important breakthrough" and they had laid the foundation for international action "in the years to come".
But he also accepted it was a partial victory, saying the pact was "not enough", the road ahead would be hard and there was a long way still to go.
David Axelrod, his chief adviser, took to the airwaves this morning to defend the outcome of the 31-hour negotiations in similar vein: it was not perfect but it was a start. "Nobody says that this is the end of the road," Axelrod told CNN. "The end of the road would have been the complete collapse of those talks. This is a great step forward."
Politico, a Washington-based political news website, said the agreement was "more notable for what it doesn't accomplish than what it does, an inconvenient truth Obama ruefully acknowledged".
The last time Obama imposed himself into a gathering of world leaders in Copenhagen in October, when he lent his weight to Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics, it ended in humiliation. This time the outcome was not so ignominious, and the administration could and did claim credit for some, albeit non-binding, results.
Critics were quick to disparage Obama's achievement as a meaningless compromise. Friends of the Earth US dismissed the agreement as a sham. "This is not a strong deal or a just one – it isn't even a real one," said the group's president Erich Pica. He blamed the US for the absence of concrete results saying it was the main polluter behind the climate crisis yet it had failed to put enough money on the table to help poor countries cope with its consequences.
On the other side of the debate, Club for Growth, a campaign for small government and low taxes, hailed the agreement as an ironic triumph. Its head, Chris Chocola, said a binding deal would have destroyed 30 million American jobs, but he was relieved when Obama described it as a meaningful pact. "When politicians call something 'meaningful', that means it isn't," Chocola said.
The question for the White House now is how the Copenhagen agreement will affect its ambitions to present Congress with a wide ranging energy bill that would enshrine a cap-and-trade system for reducing emissions through bartering. Opponents of cap-and-trade, such as the Club for Growth, are likely to be emboldened in their efforts to frustrate the administration, pointing to the absence of a firm commitment internationally to set emissions reduction targets. Against that, the White House will argue there is enough of a global mandate to merit pressing ahead with its legislative plans.
The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said it was time for America to move quickly to develop a unilateral strategy in which the Senate would pass an energy bill setting a long-term price on carbon "that will really stimulate America to become the world leader in clean-tech. If we lead by example, more people will follow us by emulation than by compulsion of some UN treaty."
In an editorial, the Washington Post saw grounds for limited optimism that the Senate would act. It said that the Copenhagen agreement was weak and inadequate, but "this outcome, however imperfect, should prod the US Senate to take up climate-change legislation. Even if China hadn't moved, reducing America's dependence on foreign sources of energy and tacking domestic pollution are strong enough reasons to pass a bill."
The Post also noted that Copenhagen had given a glimpse of a new world order in which the US and China would increasingly shape international diplomacy. This so-called G2 of the world's two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases had the fate of any climate change treaty in its hands.