Obama the cowboy rams through a sham deal for the rest of the world to sign their names to

[Cross-posted to Project Survival Media]

So Obama just held a press conference announcing the US, China, India and South Africa (possibly Brazil?) are going to ram through a final climate text. Bill McKibben, founder of the 350 campaign, looked extremely upset as he walked through the room when it was announced. I asked him what he thought. He said,

“I think we’ve just seen the end of the UN.”

This New York Times article scoops how Obama stormed West Wing-style into what was apparently a private meeting between the Chinese, Indian and Brazilian leaders, asking that they stop negotiating in secret. Then together they had a secret meeting to decide for the other 189 countries what they’d be signing in Copenhagen.

Apparently the temperature rise target is down to 2 degrees. Which would be great. But the US is not committing to any higher mitigation targets, and Obama openly admitted they do not meet what the science tells us we need to do. He congratulated himself on helping seal in the “emerging countries,” even though Brazil, China, and India went into this process saying they were willing to tackle this problem as long as the US led the way. And he made no mention of doing anything more than the fundraising campaign he and Secretary Clinton announced they’d do to raise $100 billion for mitigation and adaptation in developing countries.

But more than that, he’s shown that he really is just another American cowboy. The current stage of these negotiations has been going on for two years, and there’s a reason the tiniest and least powerful countries in the world were willing to sign onto this process. Presumably, all of their voices were going to be heard (then again, presumably so were civil society’s). Now he’s declared, completely outside of this process (though in the same building) that none of these negotiations really matter, because the real decisions needed to be made by the big boys. No more secret meetings? Tell me Kiribati and Tuvalu were in that room. Or even consulted about the text these countries agreed on.

There are a lot of uncertain things about what this text even means, since it’s not going to be legally binding. I’m still trying to gather people’s reactions here at the Fresh Air Centre to understand it better. It may have a UNFCCC letterhead, but it will essentially be a document written without the consultation of almost any country in the global south, without the EU (bizarrely), without the President of the COP15 negotiations.

This is not an agreement to be proud of. And it seems like we’ve just witnessed the rug being pulled out from underneath the UN one of the most important issues it’s ever been a forum to address. The US has undermined the world’s most credible common negotiating table in a brand new way, and has rammed through a treaty that will sign some of the parties here onto catastrophe — or disappearance.

The video of Obama’s announcement, from theuptake.org: