COP15 Final Day: Late Evening Update

They don’t make coffee strong enough for times like these. With the midnight hour approaching here on the front lines of the COP15 and closed-door negotiations still going strong more than 15 hours after they started today, Operation Copenhagen, like the thousands of other media folk walking around the Bella Center like zombies, is hitting a wall. It seems the hellishly protracted climate change inspired horse-trading between nations is perfectly and painfully dovetailing with the sleepless realities of the journalists in the trenches … Suddenly a police baton beat down is looking somewhat soothing compared to the ass kicking that international bureaucracy is giving the world tonight. Make no mistake sports fans, there are no easy yards when trying to get 190-odd nations to compromise. And no, it doesn’t seem to matter much that the fate of the world seems to be hanging in the balance.

With dozens of TV, print, and Internet media folks literally passing out in corners and on couches around here, it is impressive that rumors are still flying and draft versions of an alleged “Copenhagen Accord” are being leaked. Some have said India and China and Brazil have walked out, others say a legally binding deal set to rope the nations of the world into mediocre carbon reduction schedules by 2010 is moments away, still others say that the aforementioned draft has already been gutted and replaced by an even weaker one. The COP15 actually came out from hiding a few hours ago and reconvened publicly to take care of some housekeeping and to pass some tentative bits and pieces of a treaty but it was remarkably light on details and, like I said, they don’t make coffee strong enough for this stuff.

The general vibe seems to be that all parties involved have agreed in principle to allowing no more than a 2 degrees (Celsius) global temperature uptick but how exactly they are going to get there remains to be seen. Carbon reduction schedules are tough to pin down and, after President Obama explained this morning that the United States isn’t budging from its 17 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050, it seems the world, even if they sign a document that says otherwise, is, according to scientists, looking at heating up past the desired threshold no matter.