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Copenhagen was much worse than just another bad deal, because it illustrated a profound shift in global geopolitics. This is fast becoming China's century, yet its leadership has displayed that multilateral environmental governance is not only not a priority, but is viewed as a hindrance to the new superpower's freedom of action. I left Copenhagen more despondent than I have felt in a long time. After all the hope and all the hype, the mobilisation of thousands, a wave of optimism crashed against the rock of global power politics, fell back, and drained away.

There were 192 countries represented in Copenhagen to discuss Climate Change or the effects of man’s CO2 output as it increases the Earth’s temperature. One country, China, stop the whole process from moving forward. Delegates were there for two weeks Dec. 7 through Dec. 18, 2009 and save for China no one, not one single delegate mentioned an exit strategy. An exit strategy you say? What is a global warming exit strategy? An exit strategy is simply this: If scientific evident continues to show beyond a shadow of a doubt that CO2 emissions are not inextricably linked to the earth’s...

Barack Obama is not used to being the guy not invited to a party. At the Copenhagen global warming conference, however, he found that not everyone wanted to hang with him. Our president can't take a hint. After Mr. Obama's bilateral meeting with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, the Chinese began sending lower-level functionaries to the multilateral meetings. A frustrated Mr. Obama pressed for another bilateral meeting, which was scheduled for Friday at 6:15 p.m. Other leaders of the countries known as the "BASIC" bloc were harder to pin down. So imagine Mr. Obama's surprise when he arrived for the bilateral...

Time magazine may think U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is 2009’s “Person of the Year,” but Time is wrong: 2009 was dominated by Barack Obama, even though it wasn’t a great year for him. Obama’s human frailties surfaced. Words, not deeds, are his forte. Critics and fans tended to agree that, so far, his presidency is one of great intentions (if not great expectations). He’s good at saying what he’d like to do, but has difficulty doing (or being able to do) very much. Cheerleaders confuse rhetoric with results. Obama is the most accessible president in recent times. He’s...

The credibility of the European Union’s flagship carbon trading scheme was dealt another blow on Monday after carbon prices fell to six-month lows as UN talks in Copenhagen failed to deliver a strong climate deal. Traders and analysts say low prices could continue well into 2010, slowing investment in low-carbon technologies which have already been dented by tight financing due to a slow economy. “(The low price) reinforces the idea that relying solely on the EU ETS to drive investment is probably not the answer at the moment,” said Andy Kelly, head of business development at Centrica. “This does give...

Energy: An oil company wants to invest its profits in clean-burning American natural gas. A Hungarian billionaire and a "green" politician want to stop it. This is the real Climate-gate scandal. While the greenies of the world united in Copenhagen to talk about the weather, emitting a Third World-country-size chunk of greenhouse gases to gather there, the world's largest oil company, Exxon Mobil, was doing something about it. On Dec. 14, Exxon agreed to buy XTO Energy, a natural gas firm, in a deal valued at $41 billion. XTO is one of the leaders in something called "fracking" technology, in...

It was serendipitous to have almost simultaneous climaxes in Copenhagen and Congress. The former's accomplishment was indiscernible, the latter's was unsightly. It would have been unprecedented had the president not described the outcome of the Copenhagen climate change summit as "unprecedented," that being the most overworked word in his hardworking vocabulary of self-celebration. Actually, the mountain beneath the summit – a mountain of manufactured hysteria, predictable cupidity, antic demagoguery and dubious science – labored mightily and gave birth to a mouselet, a 12-paragraph document committing the signatories to ... make a list. A list of the goals they have no...

Back in the days when war was a form of romance, there was a tactic called the "forlorn hope". When an army reached the end of its string while laying siege to a fortress or walled city, a single unit of several hundred men would be selected for a final attempt at overcoming the walls. Artillery would fire one last series of rounds to make a breach, and the forlorn hope would make its mad dash toward the walls, to try to overcome through muscle and will what months of patient strategy had failed to do. As for the level...

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...

Havana, Cuba - Cuba's foreign minister called President Barack Obama an "imperial and arrogant" liar Monday for his conduct at the U.N. climate conference, a reflection of the communist island's increasingly fiery verbal attacks on the U.S. government. Bruno Rodriguez spent an hour and a half lambasting Obama's behavior in Copenhagen, telling a news conference, "at this summit, there was only imperial, arrogant Obama, who does not listen, who imposes his positions and even threatens developing countries." He called the summit "a fallacy, a farce" and said Washington used back-room deals and strong-arm tactics to foist on the world a...

The climate campaign, built step-by-step over the last 20 years, has reached its Waterloo. The Copenhagen conference that ended Friday was an exercise in political theater. It not only failed to produce a binding agreement, but the potential emissions curbs it endorsed fall far below what climate orthodoxy demands, while the proposed wealth transfer from rich nations to poor nations is a political nonstarter. Back home, cap and trade legislation remains on life support, even though it has been significantly watered down so as to postpone real costs to consumers for a decade or more. In the midst of this...

The biggest national security news last week barely made the news at all. It is troubling to watch Congress continue to play politics with the reauthorization of key counterterrorism tools in the Patriot Act (like the ability to tract terrorists as they jump from cell phone to cell phone) and basically see the White House stand on the sidelines. By law, these tools would “sunset” at the end of the year unless reauthorized by Congress. Obviously, these authorities are needed, but Congress has dithered and the White House has done little to pressure the legislators to act.

BEIJING — China dismissed Tuesday a British editorial accusing it of "hijacking" the U.N.-sponsored climate talks in Copenhagen as baseless and politically motivated. British climate change minister Edward Miliband's editorial singled out Beijing as the culprit behind the talks' near collapse. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said the piece seemed designed to sow discord among developing nations. She said the comments by an individual British politician — not mentioning Miliband by name — were an attempt to "shirk the obligations of developed countries to their developing counterparts and foment discord among developing countries, but the attempt was doomed to...

Russian analysts accuse Britain's Meteorological Office of cherry-picking Russian temperature data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures. Is Copenhagen rooted in a single tree in Siberia? Michael Mann, a Penn State meteorologist, wrote in Friday's Washington Post that "stolen" e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit still don't alter the evidence for climate change.

Global energy businesses are disappointed and confused by the climate deal agreed in Copenhagen, saying it does not provide enough certainty to justify the huge investments needed to cut carbon emissions. The deal – agreed by major economies including the US and China on Friday evening but not formally adopted by the United Nations – makes a commitment to limit the rise in global temperatures but does not specify caps on emissions to achieve that objective. Chief executives and business groups in Europe were particularly critical of the deal. Peter Voser – the chief executive of oil and gas group...

LONDON (AFP) – British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Monday accused a handful of countries of holding the UN climate summit to ransom as bitter recriminations swirled over the outcome of the negotiations. While China's Premier Wen Jiabao insisted his government had played an "important and constructive" role, Britain said the meeting had lurched into farce and pointed the finger of blame at Beijing. And the summit host, Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen, rapped the lower-level negotiators for failing to make headway in nearly two weeks of talks and then leaving their masters with too much to do at...

Without a scintilla of evidence that rising temperatures threaten the extinction of life on the planet, anyone who expresses common sense doubts about the Doomsday prophecies of climate alarmists is dismissed as a "skeptic," an "extremist," or a heretic in the religion of environmentalism. No one needs to apologize for being a scientific ignoramus on climate change when the world's leading publicist for global warming, Al Gore, is not a scientist either. Yet some blindly accept Gore's claim in An Inconvenient Truth that melting ice caps and rising sea levels will drown New York City and Shanghai under 15 feet...

Prices drop as European Union sticks to 2020 emissions targetLONDON (MarketWatch) -- The price of European carbon emission permits dropped nearly 9% Monday after climate talks in Copenhagen resulted in an accord that fell short of initial expectations.Emission allowances for December 2010 delivery fell to 12.77 euros a ton Monday, from Friday's settlement price of 13.58 euros. The contract earlier dropped as much as 8.7% to 12.40 euros a ton. Emission allowances haven't traded that low in more than six months. The decline came after the United Nation's Copenhagen summit acknowledged a U.S.-led accord to combat climate change and prevent...

The global climate negotiations in Copenhagen produced neither a grand success nor the complete meltdown that seemed almost certain as late as Friday afternoon. Despite two years of advance work, the meeting failed to convert a rare gathering of world leaders into an ambitious, legally binding action plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It produced instead a softer interim accord that, at least in principle, would curb greenhouses gases, provide ways to verify countries’ emissions, save rain forests, shield vulnerable nations from the impacts of climate change, and share the costs. The hard work has only begun, in Washington and...

The mountains shall labor, and what will be born? A stupid little mouse. Thanks to hundreds of thousands of US citizens who contacted their elected representatives to protest about the unelected, communistic world government with near-infinite powers of taxation, regulation and intervention that was proposed in early drafts of the Copenhagen Treaty, there is no Copenhagen Treaty. There is not even a Copenhagen Agreement. There is a “Copenhagen Accord”. The White House spinmeisters spun, and their official press release proclaimed, with more than usual fatuity, that President Obama had “salvaged” a deal at Copenhagen in bilateral talks with China, India,...

A disturbed man has been arrested after a series of shots were fired in the Forum neighbourhood. Police closed off the area around Forum in Copenhagen just before six this morning after a series of shots were fired in the neighbourhood. Half an hour later, police detained a man described as mentally disturbed, in a building in Kleinsgade street. “He fired a series of shots from a hunting rifle into the air and into the ceiling of a building,” says Police Spokesman Søren Wiborg. “The shots were reported at 5.30 a.m. and when the first patrol arrived they heard another...

"Oh, you are all here. I had some things to discuss with all of you so it’s good that you are together in the same room,” US President Barack Obama said as he strode into the room where the BASIC countries — Brazil, South Africa, India and China — were holding their last, intensive meetings in Copenhagen. “We really need a deal,” he said. “It’s better that we take one step forward rather than two steps back. I’m willing to be flexible.” And he rolled up his sleeves and sat down. Obama had come to meet China’s Wen Jiabao, in...

The best summation of the UN climate circus in Denmark comes from Andrew Bolt of Australia's Herald Sun: "Nothing is real in Copenhagen – not the temperature record, not the predictions, not the agenda, not the 'solution'." Just so. Reuters, for example, carried a moving account of the speech by Ian Fry, lead negotiator for Tuvalu, the beleaguered Pacific island nation soon to be under water because of a planet-devastating combination of your SUV and unsustainable bovine flatulence from Vermont farms.

CHINA "hijacked'' the Copenhagen summit by blocking a legally-binding treaty, Britain's Climate Change Secretary David Miliband said. China vetoed attempts to give legal force to the accord reached at the United Nations climate summit. It also blocked an agreement on reductions in global emissions... "This was a chaotic process dogged by procedural games,'' The summit set a commitment to limit global warming to 2C but did not spell out the important global emissions targets for 2020 or 2050 that were the key to holding down temperatures. It also promised $100 billion for poor nations that risked bearing the brunt of...

Today the gloves came off and the true purpose of the “global warming” scare became nakedly visible. Ugo Chavez, the Socialist president of Venezuela, blamed “global warming” on capitalism – and received a standing ovation from very nearly all of the delegates, lamentably including those from those of the capitalist nations of the West that are on the far Left – and that means too many of them. Previously Robert Mugabe, dictator of Rhodesia, who had refused to leave office when he had been soundly defeated in a recent election, had also won plaudits at the conference for saying that...

The head of the UN's climate change panel - Dr Rajendra Pachauri - is accused of making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies, Christopher Booker and Richard North write. No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007. Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former...

There is scope for debate – and innumerable newspaper quizzes – about who was the most influential public figure of the year, or which the most significant event. But there can be little doubt which word won the prize for most important adjective. 2009 was the year in which "global" swept the rest of the political lexicon into obscurity. There were "global crises" and "global challenges", the only possible resolution to which lay in "global solutions" necessitating "global agreements". Gordon Brown actually suggested something called a "global alliance" in response to climate change. (Would this be an alliance against the...

And lo, the cry went up from the mainstream media: When, O when, will the Copenhagen climate summit, which concluded on Friday, discuss the real solution to global warming – fewer people? When will Jesse Jackson get around to talking about race? Writing in The National Post (Canada’s largest newspaper) on December 8, columnist Diane Francis waxed apocalyptic, “The ‘inconvenient truth’ overhanging the UN’s Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.” Francis insisted, “The world’s other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere are being destroyed...

Cast: Barack Obama as Benny Hill Wen Jiabao as Little Old Bald Guy (wigged) Nicholas Sarkozy as The Frenchman Angela Merkel as Sexy Prime Minister Robert Mugabe, Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, etc. as Extras Set up: Benny goes to Copenhagen to get the world’s leaders to sign a climate Agreement. Farcical results ensue. Players in position? Set the camera to skip-frame. Aaaaaand…Cue the saxophone. Daaa, dah dit duh dah-duh, dit dah dit duh…(you’re going to have to use your imagination here, folks; or click here—clip is from the UN!). Earnest Obama came to Copenhagen to talk. “The time for talk...

A Global Shakedown Any climate agreement that changes one law in the US or transfers one dime of taxpayer funds to another country is a willful selling of our national sovereignty.  This is a taxpayer shakedown meant to transfer trillions from productive, working people to the useless international bureaucrats, who skim their percentage then pass pennies on to favored kleptocratic rulers.American aren't buying it, thank God in heaven:Just how bad is the threat from global warming? About one in six Americans (17 percent) think the global warming situation is a crisis, which is essentially the same number who believe in...

Video: (R) Rep Dana Rohrabacher speakes from the US House "Wake up America...conspiracy of lies and deception...we must fight the globalist clique that is trying to shackel future Americans to a burdon of economy killing debt!" I wonder of this speech will have any impact at all?

Obama the hypocritical eco-loon ... Obama the Neo-"Com" ... Obama beech-slapped by Sarkozy during a U.S. diplomacy lesson ... and other awesome PhotoChop work by Jamie.

Today ESPN broadcast the "Green Game" a college basketball game featuring two of the best men's college basketball teams: Kansas and University of Michigan. Friends, the broadcast was shameful. Throughout the entire game the announcers, ESPN crew and college officials were focused on trying to shove down the viewers throats the hoax of climate change, featuring propaganda footage and biased commentary from the sports announcers declaring the need for Americans to reduce carbon emissions or risk devastation to the environment. The broadcast took place the week that the Copenhagen Climate Summit is taking place - yet another propaganda-driven effort to...

I am a baby boomer, which is to say my life has coincided with turbulent and awesome times. From the Cold War to Vietnam, from Watergate to Monicagate, through the horrors of 9/11 and the stunning lifestyle advances, my generation's era has been historic and exciting. Yet for all the drama and change, the years only occasionally instilled in me the sensation I feel almost constantly now. I am afraid for my country. I am afraid -- actually, certain -- we are losing the heart and soul that made America unique in human history. Yes, we have enemies, but the...

COPENHAGEN | Found a seat at meeting, worked out key accord with ChinaWASHINGTON -- It was almost unthinkable. The president of the United States walked into a meeting of fellow world leaders, and there wasn't a chair for him, a sure sign he was not expected, maybe not even wanted. President Obama didn't pause, however. "I'm going to sit by my friend Lula," he said, moving toward Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. A Brazilian aide gave the U.S. president his chair, and Obama spent the next 80 minutes helping craft new requirements for disclosing efforts to fight global...

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) gave his challenger in the 2008 presidential election a stiff review Sunday as President Barack Obama nears completion of his first year in office. "[Obama] said there would be a change in the climate in Washington," McCain said. "There's been a change. It's more partisan. It's more bitterly divided than it's been." (snip) "At least under 'Hillarycare' they tried seriously to negotiate with Republicans," McCain said."There's been -- there has been no effort that I know of that -- serious across-the-table negotiations, such as I have engaged in with Democrats and with other administrations. And that...

The Copenhagen summit achieved its main aim, to maintain the carbon-trading system established by the Kyoto Protocol, says Christopher Booker As fairy-tale snow gently descended on Copenhagen, the great global warming conference degenerated through pantomime, boredom, chaos and anger to its entirely predictable conclusion – a colossal pile of fudge with a very hard and nasty rock hidden at its centre. The "world summit" on climate change was never really going to be about saving the world from global warming at all. Even if the delegates had got all they wanted, it would no more have had any influence on...

The now-finished climate change summit in Copenhagen marks the "arrogance of man," former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) said this weekend. Palin, who had urged President Barack Obama not to attend the conference in Denmark, blasted the agreement world leaders made late on Friday to begin stemming emissions that contribute to climate change. 
Palin tweeted early Saturday morning: Copenhgen=arrogance of man2think we can change nature's ways.MUST b good stewards of God's earth,but arrogant&naive2say man overpwers nature Earth saw clmate chnge4 ions;will cont 2 c chnges.R duty2responsbly devlop resorces4humankind/not pollute&destroy;but cant alter naturl chng

President Obama reportedly was re luctant to attend the final day of the UN's Copenhagen climate-change summit unless it was front-end wired to be a major political success. But he went anyway, was twice humiliated in public by the Chinese premier and then finally settled for what the White House hailed as a "meaningful agreement." Really? A top aide admitted that the deal was basically just "an important first step" that was "not sufficient to combat the threat of climate change." Then Obama himself dropped the other shoe: The agreement contains no specific commitments on carbon emissions, only pledges that...

Senior US officials insist that President Barack Obama did not "crash" a secret Chinese meeting in the final dramatic hours of the Copenhagen climate change talks. They portrayed the President as pulling negotiations back from the brink of collapse on a day that veered between chaos and farce. Aides said that by standing up to the Chinese on the make-and-break issue of transparency, he helped force a deal, however flimsy. The President was desperate not to return to Washington empty-handed after his risky one-day dash to Denmark.

Just after midnight, Copenhagen time, Gordon Brown appeared in front of the Sky News camera. "I feel I've played a part in bringing countries together," said the Prime Minister, in a line clearly prepared long before the disaster unfolding around him. Mr Brown had, in fact, played little part in the final deal that emerged in the early hours of Saturday, and would be well advised to make that abundantly clear. For even as he spoke, international unity was falling apart – and the emotional temperature inside the conference centre was already rising to levels beyond even the most doom-laden...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The White House Saturday sought to rally support for the contentious deal brokered by President Barack Obama at UN climate talks by listing prominent Americans who back the plan against global warming, though opponents also spoke up. A statement released by the White House included quotes from environmentalists, captains of industry and leading elected officials from Obama's Democratic Party praising the "breakthrough" that will "lay the foundation for international action in the years to come." Michael Eckhart, head of the American Council on Renewable Energy, applauded Obama's "wisdom in achieving an agreement on the aspirational goal, limiting...

I take it all back. Copenhagen was worth it, after all – if only for the sphincter-bursting rage its supposed failure has caused among our libtard watermelon chums. (That’s watermelon, as in: green on the outside, red on the inside). As Damian reports, on Twitter they’re all planning to cleanse Mother Gaia of their polluting presence Jonestown-style. The Great Moonbat is sounding more unhinged than ever: "Goodbye Africa, goodbye south Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral reefs and rainforest. It was nice knowing you. Not that we really cared. The governments which moved so swiftly to save the banks...

Russian analysts accuse Britain’s Meteorological Office of cherry-picking Russian temperature data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures. Is Copenhagen rooted in a single tree in Siberia? Michael Mann, a Penn State meteorologist, wrote in Friday’s Washington Post that “stolen” e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit still don’t alter the evidence for climate change. Mann, a creator of the discredited hockey-stick graph used in reports from the U.N.‘s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show man-made warming, attacks climate skeptics, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, saying they “confuse the public.”

The U.N. climate conference narrowly escaped collapse Saturday as bitterly divided delegates agreed after all-night talks to recognize a political compromise that President Barack Obama brokered with China and other emerging powers. The Copenhagen Accord was bogged down for hours by protests from delegates who felt they were excluded from the process or said the deal didn't go far enough in cutting the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. After a break, the conference president gaveled a decision to "take note" of the agreement instead of formally approving it. Experts said that clears the way for the accord to...

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - U.N. climate talks ended with a bare-minimum agreement on Saturday when delegates "noted" an accord struck by the United States, China and other emerging powers that falls far short of the conference's original goals. "Finally we sealed a deal," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said. "The 'Copenhagen Accord' may not be everything everyone had hoped for, but this ... is an important beginning." A long road lies ahead. The accord -- weaker than a legally binding treaty and weaker even than the 'political' deal many had foreseen -- left much to the imagination. It set a target of...

COPENHAGEN – A plan to protect the world's biologically rich tropical forests by paying poor nations to protect them was shelved Saturday after world leaders failed to agree on a binding deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Burning trees to clear land for plantations or cattle ranches and logging forests for wood is blamed for about 20 percent of the world's emissions. That's as much carbon dioxide as all the world's cars, trucks, trains, planes and ships combined. About 32 million acres (13 million hectares) of forests are cut down each year — an area about the size of England...

President Obama returned to the White House from the U.N. Climate Conference in Copenhagen in the wee hours of this morning, having secured a modest, non-binding, three-page deal aimed at combating global warming. After getting a wee bit of rest, Obama by early afternoon had set his sights on getting a climate bill out of the Senate that, he claims, will curb carbon emissions and, to boot, create new jobs by fostering new industries. In a statement, Obama first lauded his accomplishments in Copenhagen and then focused his attention on Capitol Hill. "For the first time in history … the...

In a late night posting on her Twitter feed, Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin continued to blast climate change believers Friday, calling the talks in Copenhagen, Denmark a representation of man's "arrogance," for believing people have an impact on nature. "Arrogant&Naive2say man overpwers nature," Palin tweeted. "Earth saw clmate chnge4 ions;will cont 2 c chnges.R duty2responsbly devlop resorces4humankind/not pollute&destroy;but cant alter naturl chng," the former Republican vice presidential nominee wrote. Palin's latest comments come after weeks of tangling over climate change with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, former vice president Al Gore, and President Obama. In an op-ed in the Washington...

Copenhagen was a cold town last week for the global-warming crowd. The expected reorganization of the world economy to fit the green template vanished amid blizzard conditions in a country that has had just seven white Christmases in the past century. God certainly has a sense of humor.