Brits give up hope for Copenhagen global-warming treaty

The Times of London reports that the talks in Copenhagen to gain an international consensus on emissions limitations for industrial and developing nations are collapsing.  Global-warming activists hoped to pin nations down to firm commitments for cutting emissions and limiting energy use.   However, no one seems to want to commit economic suicide, and the talks will likely produce nothing but non-binding resolutions:

A world treaty on climate change will be delayed by up to a year and is likely to be watered down because countries with the highest greenhouse gas emissions are refusing to commit to legally binding reductions.

British officials preparing for next month’s UN summit in Copenhagen said the best that could be hoped for was that national leaders would make “political agreements” on emission cuts and payments to help poor countries to adapt to climate change. These agreements would be non-binding, however, and could later be revised or rescinded by national parliaments. …

The admission that no treaty will be signed at Copenhagen marks the failure of the process agreed at a UN meeting in Bali in December 2007, when industrialised countries agreed to deliver a binding climate-change agreement within two years. The delay has angered developing countries, which say they are already suffering from man-made climate change.

What does this situation need?  More gasbagging:

Benedict Dempsey, Save the Children’s humanitarian policy officer, said: “The cost of any delay to a climate deal will be counted in children’s lives. Save the Children estimates that 250,000 children could be killed by climate change next year.["]

Well, that’s a shock.  A global-warming hysteric group claims that the increase of the planet’s temperature is the main cause of the deaths of 250,000 children — in areas torn by war, poverty, corruption, totalitarianism, and disease.  Those can’t be the primary causes of death, however, not in the face of the supposed advance of global temperatures by a fraction of a degree!

This may be the best news out of Copenhagen since Senator James Inhofe arrived.  A severe global recession seems to have reacquainted world leaders with a realistic set of priorities, mainly with their responsibility to get their people back to work.  That will take energy production at realistic prices, not a set of new burdens designed to kneecap national economies even further.  Maybe that even includes the Obama administration:

Joss Garman, of Greenpeace UK, said the EU should put more pressure on the US to agree targets. Copenhagen was the best chance to slash emissions, he said, but added “politicians seem determined to blow it”.

He said that the US, influenced by “Big Carbon special interests”, was “a dead weight” on the talks.

“Big Carbon”?  Wouldn’t that include all carbon-based life forms on the planet?  Leftist paranoia continues apace.  The US can continue to provide Copenhagen with “dead weight,” in order to balance the false hysteria of the radical environmentalists pushing this nonsense.

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