A hush fell over the entire Bella Center Friday morning during President Obama’s eight-minute speech . He took on climate skeptics with his opening words and then made a pitch for a collective agreement.
“While the reality of climate change is not in doubt, I have to be honest, as the world watches us today, I think our ability to take collective action is in doubt right now and it hangs in the balance,” he said. “I believe we can act boldly, and decisively, in the face of a common threat. That is why I have come here today. Not to talk, but to act.”
The U.N. climate talks were in grave disarray Friday, prompting Obama to change his schedule and hold closed door talks with 19 other world leaders in an effort to forge a last-minute agreement on fighting global warming.
World leaders handed off the draft text of about three pages at about 3 a.m. local time to their ministers and they continued to work on it through the night. But by 5 a.m., negotiators from Mexico and the G-77 plus China said they were nowhere near agreement on the final document
Pollution cuts and the best way to monitor those actions remained unresolved. And negotiators also didn’t come to an agreement on an important procedural issue — just what legal form a future deal would take.
Delegates earlier blamed both the United States and China for the lack of a political agreement that Obama, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and more than 110 other world leaders are supposed to sign today.
But French President Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking after the unscheduled meeting with Obama and the other leaders, said progress in the climate talks was being held back by China.
The United States got its share of criticism as well. “President Obama was not very proactive. He didn’t offer anything more,” delegate Thomas Negints, from Papua New Guinea, told the Associated Press. He said his country had hoped for “more on emissions, put more money on the table, take the lead.”
Obama may eventually become known as “the man who killed Copenhagen,” said Greenpeace U.S. Executive Director Phil Radford.
Brazilian president Luiz Lula da Silva told negotiators how frustrated he was that the job was left to heads of state after the talks ran until just before dawn Friday.
“I am not sure if such an angel or wise man will come down to this plenary and put in our minds the intelligence that we lacked,” Lula said. “I believe in God. I believe in miracles.”
To move the talks forward, Lula said Brazil, a developing country, would give money to help other developing countries cope with the costs of global warming.
Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said the president met with world leaders from China and Russia, both seen as key participants in the climate talks, as well as the heads of state from wealthy nations like Australia, the United Kingdom, France and Germany and those from developing countries like Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Colombia.
“Most of the leaders are still working out a way to produce a meaningful agreement to be adopted,” Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman Kazuo Kodama said.
The lack of a deal in their sights caused leaders to throw out the planned timetable for the final day of the two-week UN climate conference, with their informal talks delaying the opening of the regular session.
Broad disputes continued behind closed doors between wealthy nations and developing ones, delegates said — the divide that from the start has dogged the two-week U.N. climate conference, which aimed to reach agreements on deeper reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming.
No agreed text had emerged as presidents and premiers were gathering at a Copenhagen convention hall, said Swedish environment minister Andreas Carlgren.
“It is now up to world leaders to decide,” he said, suggesting they would be pressed to make last-minute decisions on the thrust of the climate declaration.
Carlgren, negotiating on behalf of the 27-nation European Union, blamed the morning’s impasse on the Chinese for “blocking again and again,” and on the United States for coming too late with an improved offer, a long-range climate aid program announced Thursday by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
A leading African delegate, meanwhile, complained bitterly about the proposed declaration represented in the three-page draft. “It’s weak. There’s nothing ambitious in this text,” Lumumba Di-Aping of Sudan, a leader of the developing nations bloc, said Friday.
Delegates filtering out of the predawn discussions Friday sounded disappointed.
“It’s a political statement, but it isn’t a lot,” said Chinese delegate Li Junhua.
“It would be a major disappointment. A political declaration would not guarantee our survival,” said Selwin Hart, a delegate from Barbados speaking for the Alliance of Small Island States, many of which are threatened by seas rising form global warming.
Watch the NCR Ecology channel and the NCR Today group blog for updates on the Copenhagen climate conference.
[Rich Heffern is an NCR staff writer. His email: rheffern@ncronline.org]
