Der Spiegel: Copenhagen a Club for Losers

Der Spiegel blasts the Copenhagen conference as “a Club for Losers” after it utterly failed to produce a consensus even on Barack Obama’s facesaving non-binding resolution.  They excoriate everyone from China to Obama and even the UN, but retain their most pungent shots for European diplomats who bungled both expectations and diplomacy.  And Der Speigel now says the best hope for progress won’t come from Turtle Bay, but from a process set in motion by a man whom AGW hysterics used to regard as the devil incarnate:

After days of negotiations, debate, political drama and pages of will-they or won’t-they headlines, the Copenhagen climate conference is over. And there is no conclusive agreement on any important issues. So did the situation produce any winners — or has the whole world become a club for environmental losers?

Even if the world’s leading climate scientists are only partially correct, then without a fairly ambitious climate agreement there will be dramatic consequences for our planet. And the climate conference in Copenhagen neither delivered such an agreement nor did it show any concievable way of reaching one. Countless scientific studies leave us in no doubt that the whole of humanity — and in particular future generations — will lose out. Because, at best, we can only guess the exact nature of the consequences of global warming and the extent of negative change in our natural environment.

Well, perhaps we should wait to see if the world’s leading climate scientists are “even partially correct” before using AGW as a means for a massive redistribution of wealth.  This admission alone seems rather startling from Der Spiegel.  It shows just how much damage Climategate has done to the AGW hysteric movement as a whole.  They’re the biggest losers, and the draining of their credibility means it will be very difficult to stage another Copenhagen without a fully transparent and complete data set that actually determines whether AGW hysterics are correct at all.

But this is even more amusing for its irony:

The United Nations has always maintained that climate protection can only be effective if it’s administered globally — and that the issue cannot be solved by smaller groups like the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate. It was actually former US President George W. Bush who initiated this kind of forum but at the time many observers were skeptical that it was Bush’s way of circumventing a broader, more global consensus on climate change. This most recent effort, featuring 16 major economies, was launched by President Obama in April of this year and was meant to augment the UN talks in Copenhagen.

And although UN chief Ban Ki-moon seemed almost euphoric during his concluding statements in Copenhagen and at a press conference, it seemed that almost the opposite emotion would have been more appropriate.

The chaotic Copenhagen summit showed up the UN’s shortcomings more clearly than ever — non-governmental organizations felt that they were shut out, small nations believed they were overlooked and some of the larger nations — and the Chinese in particular — showed exactly how unwilling they were to compromise.

And it was Bush who actually outperformed Europe and its cap-and-trade system on carbon emissions, too.   While being demonized by AGW hysterics, Bush tried reaching economic agreements with China and India that didn’t involve massive wealth redistribution, maintained economic growth, and lowered actual CO2 emissions.  Why?  Europe’s system essentially turned into a corruption market instead of a method to reduce carbon emissions.

George W. Bush has gone from environmental demon to AGW hysteria’s final hope. Don’t expect Hope and Change posters by Shepherd Fairey to start popping up all over the EU, of course.

Meanwhile, the UK blames China for crushing Hopenhagen:

China is to blame for the poor progress made during the Copenhagen climate change talks, Ed Miliband said today.

In the most direct attack on the country to date, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change accused China of hijacking the summit.

He claimed that Beijing “vetoed” moves to give legal force to the accord and blocked an agreement on global reductions in greenhouse emissions.

Its delegates even blocked attempts by advanced industrial countries to set a target of an 80 per cent reduction by 2050 for themselves, even though China is classified as a developing country.

Perhaps that’s because (a) China also took note of the corruption endemic in Europe’s system, and (b) figured that they would not be classified as “developing” for very much longer.  China is the world’s largest carbon emitter, and its industrialization has become so significant that the International Olympic Committee had to start considering contingencies last year when smog smothered Beijing just before the start of the games.  Any international effort to limit emissions has to address China, or it will completely lack credibility with other developing nations.

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