President Obama needed to get back to Washington, DC, before he was cut off by a snow storm. Perhaps Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was in a similar hurry. Both men were in a great hurry to reach a shoddy compromise at the Copenhagen Climate Conference - one that 'respected' China's national sovereignty (i.e., meant that China did not have to sign up to any international monitoring of its commitments on CO2 emissions) and, likewise, did not entail the US having to make any commitments to limit (still less reduce) its greenhouse gas output.
The resulting Accord is a non-binding 'political' deal which talks of limiting the increase in mean annual global temperature to below 2 Celsius above the reference datum (the pre-Industrial Revolution level), but does not will the means to achieve that objective, even if that objective were adequate - which it is not.
The politicians have failed - which is no surprise. The present generation of world political leaders do not have the intellectual or administrative ability to sort out this week's laundry, let alone anything of greater import. Barack Obama and Gordon Brown would probably find it difficult to run a bath, let alone their respective countries. The time has come for drastic action, and intervention from below - from, let us say, a socially unexpected quarter: the people, maybe.
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