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not worth the paper...
President Dmitry Medvedev touted Russia as a world leader in cutting emissions at a UN climate change conference and then took the lead in ducking out of the meeting as U.S. President Barack Obama worked overtime to clinch an agreement.
Medvedev, who left the talks in Copenhagen on Friday evening to attend an informal CIS forum in Kazakhstan, offered mild praise on Saturday to those who had stayed behind to draft the nonbinding Copenhagen Accord, which sets a billion-dollar program of climate aid to poor nations but does not bind Russia or other leading polluters to make deeper cuts in their gas emissions, which are blamed for global warning.
“There are results, but they are rather modest. Unfortunately, the work was very difficult, but we managed to put a document together,” Medvedev said in Almaty, according to a transcript published on the Kremlin’s web site.
The agreement was drawn up Friday night and formally accepted Saturday morning, but it remained unclear how many of the 193 countries that participated in the United Nations-organized conference would sign it.
Obama, who met Medvedev on the sidelines of the conference to discuss nuclear cuts, added six hours to his planned nine-hour visit to push through an agreement. Medvedev, however, was one of the first world leaders to leave the conference, where he delivered a speech extolling Russia’s readiness to stop global warming.
- By Gus Leonisky at 21 Dec 2009 - 3:01pm
- Gus Leonisky's blog
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disappointment all around...
from the ABC
Business groups say they are disappointed with the outcome of the Copenhagen climate talks.
The talks in the Danish capital ended with a political accord rather than a binding agreement, with developed countries required to set emissions reduction targets by February.
The Australian Industry Group (Ai Group), one of the country's major business groups, says while it is a step forward, the agreement fell well short of expectations.
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The polar bears were also disappointed... see toon above.
justified in being disappointed
US president Barack Obama says people are justified in being disappointed by the outcome of the Copenhagen summit on climate change.
But he said in an interview with with US PBS television's Newshour that at least there had not been too much "backsliding" on previous positions.
He said this was preferable to a complete collapse of the talks.
The summit ended with no binding deal, but with nations "taking note" of a need to limit temperature rises to 2C.
"I think that people are justified in being disappointed about the outcome in Copenhagen," Mr Obama said.
"Rather than see a complete collapse in Copenhagen, in which nothing at all got done and would have been a huge backward step, at least we kind of held ground and there wasn't too much backsliding from where we were."
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see toon at top...
arrogance...
The "disappointing" outcome of December's climate summit was largely down to "arrogance" on the part of rich countries, according to Lord Stern.
The economist told BBC News that the US and EU nations had not understood well enough the concerns of poorer nations.
But, he said, the summit had led to a number of countries outlining what they were prepared to do to curb emissions.
Seventy-three countries have now signed up to the non-binding Copenhagen Accord, the summit's outcome document.
The weak nature of the document led many to condemn the summit as a failure; but Lord Stern said that view was mistaken.
"The fact of Copenhagen and the setting of the deadline two years previously at Bali did concentrate minds, and it did lead... to quite specific plans from countries that hadn't set them out before," he said.
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