China: We're not likely to agree to anything at Copenhagen

The US and other Western nations continue to press for an agreement on AGW policy in Copenhagen, but they have gotten caught in a vise of naked self-interests.  Developing nations want tens of billions of dollars in aid as well as ruinous restrictions on carbon-dioxide emissions as a means to even the economic score.  On the other hand, China — the world’s largest industrial emitter of CO2 — threw cold water on the entire process, calling an agreement on anything unlikely:

Seeking to unblock an impasse in climate talks, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the United States would only commit to building the fund if nations gathered here for global climate talks produce an international accord that includes emission reduction commitments from both developed and major developing countries; financial and technological assistance for poor countries; and a way to independently verify the cuts all nations made.

“We’re running out of time,” Clinton said at a news conference. “Without the accord, the opportunity to mobilize significant resources to assist developing countries with mitigation and adaptation will be lost.”

Clinton warned that China — which has resisted attempts for international verification of emission cuts and told officials here before Clinton spoke that a global pact seems unlikely — must agree to monitoring if a deal is to reached. An international agreement, Clinton said, would be impossible “in the absence of transparency from the second biggest emitter” in the world, which is China.

China told participants earlier Wednesday that it cannot envision reaching an immediate, operational accord out of the negotiations here, according to an official involved in the talks. Another source said Chinese officials are now seeking a two-page agreement. The source added that it is unclear what specifics such an agreement might contain, although “you can get a lot into two pages.”

In the absence of a comprehensive pact, Clinton said, the United States would take its long-term financial pledge off the table. She did not specify how much the U.S. would contribute to the fund if a substantive agreement was reached. The European Union has also committed to building a longterm, $100 billion fund, while Japan has committed $15 billion in short-term funding to poor countries over the next three years if an agreement is reached.

You can get a lot into two pages?  Not in international agreements.  That would represent little more than a mission statement, an agreement on goals rather than any legal language on emissions and processes to implement them.

Think of the complexity of regulating a naturally-occurring gas that humans exhale every second.  It would take a massive bureaucracy just to handle the verification of compliance.  The table of contents for that portion of a treaty would take more than two pages.

Without China on board on an operational agreement, Copenhagen is useless.  The US Senate will not reverse itself to ratify an agreement that excludes China or India.  Without China and the US, the rest of the world may self-flagellate over their carbon dioxide, but given the exposure of the science as biased and unreliable, not too many of them will for very long.  China may just put Copenhagen, and the AGW hysteria, out of its misery — and out of ours.