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Obama’s deal that isn’t

Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife

Nobody should be confused by the White House statement that a “meaningful agreement” was struck in Copenhagen. Headline writers should really know that just because an administration official says something doesn’t make it so.

Yes, sure. Rich countries seem to have agreed to provide poor countries with $100 billion of adaptation funding. Or rather, they agreed to “support a goal of mobilizing” the funds, whatever that means. And the U.S. seems to have gotten China to list its climate change commitments (read: whatever they feel like doing) and to agree to tell everyone else that they’re doing what they said they’d do.

Notice anything missing? How about doing anything to stop climate change? There are absolutely no new commitments or ideas on the table. The U.S. hasn’t budged an inch from its stated goal of cutting emissions by less than 5% from 1990 levels by 2020. The Chinese haven’t agreed to anything they hadn’t before. Even the EU, which went into the conference planning to up its 2020 commitments from 20% cuts to 30%, stuck to its old figure–a promise they made in Feb, 2007.

The agreement repeats the goal (agreed to last summer) of keeping global warming at under 2 degrees Celsius, or at least it acknowledges that that’s what scientists say we should do. Anyhow, according to a leaked UN report, there’s no way the commitments currently on the table (which, according to the terms of this “meaningful deal” are all non-binding anyhow) will do that.

Even a promise to hammer out a deal by the end of next year was dropped from the final text.

If there was a deal struck it was this: The parties at Copenhagen agreed NOT TO MAKE A DEAL until 2016!