If you haven’t heard the buzz yet, the big environmental news from this weekend is that U.S. President Barack Obama joined over twenty other world leaders in formal agreement that next month’s much-anticipated international climate change meetings will not yield a conclusive global treaty to fight global warming. Instead, leaders hope the meetings will be result in more of a “politically-binding” agreement, which, as we all know, means nothing at all.
“There was an assessment by the leaders that it is unrealistic to expect a full internationally, legally binding agreement could be negotiated between now and Copenhagen which starts in 22 days,” said Michael Froman, Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser for international economic matters.
The 192-nation conference, dubbed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, had been intended to produce a new global climate change treaty and people all over the world — not just politicians — have been involved in the process. Just last month thousands of climate activists across the world gathered under the banner 350.org to show world leaders just how important the outcome of these negotiations was to them.
But, as Jennifer Loven says in The Globe and Mail, “the endorsement of that conclusion by Mr. Obama and fellow leaders at a hastily arranged breakfast meeting here on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific summit served to dampen any remaining expectations for the December summit.”
A fully binding legal agreement would be pushed down the road, possibly for a second meeting in Mexico City.
[Via: The Globe and Mail]
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