A Copenhagen Accord Is Born

Something funny happened on the way to failure today at the COP15. Against long odds – and after several hours of overtime, late night backroom dealings simultaneously brokered and hindered by President Barack Obama – the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, acting in the name of Mother Earth, snatched a success of sorts from the jaws of defeat and adopted the “Copenhagen Accord” in the wee hours of Saturday morning. Or did they?

The two week and one extra day conference is over – it officially wrapped up with a press conference just past 2 p.m. Copenhagen time on Saturday – but what exactly was accomplished is anything but clear. This we know: a “Copenhagen Agreement” does indeed exist. Though far from the sweeping and legally binding climate change-fighting document that many had hoped for to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol, the new accord is an undeniable step forward in the global war against carbon emissions. It pledges to keep overall global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius, it creates a green super fund that developed nations will pay billions of dollars into (specifically, $10 billion a year through 2012 before ramping up to $100 billion by 2020) in order to help less developed countries implement climate changing measures, it makes every country explicitly explain their path to and pledge for reducing emissions no later than January 31, 2010, and it calls for a review of the whole approach by 2015 to make sure that it is actually working.

Unfortunately, it also does not do several fundamental things that COP15 activists and optimists has hoped for. It is not legally binding, it does not, at least according to science, establish a reduction target that has any hope of keeping temperature increases below the 2 degree limit, and, perhaps most importantly, it wasn’t really approved by the United Nations as a whole- it was simply “noted” in the group’s final meeting during its last meeting early Saturday. It is the latter – a fact being largely overlooked by mainstream media outlets – that looks to sink an already weak agreement in the coming weeks as countries must sign on to the document in order to make it real.