'Unprecedented' Climate Deal Is Disappointing

(Dec. 18) -- President Barack Obama late Friday heralded what he called an "unprecedented breakthrough" on curbing greenhouse gases at the Copenhagen summit on climate change, but the deal was more of a nonbinding consensus than the kind of concrete accord he described as urgent only hours earlier.

The final details described by Obama were still being hammered out after midnight in the Danish capital, and after Air Force One had already left for Washington in hopes of arriving home ahead of a major snowstorm. Before leaving, the president said he wasn't sure if the agreement even required a U.S. signature because it won't be legally binding.

If indeed wrapped up, the deal would cap a stormy week of negotiations among more than 190 nations with a host of different agendas on how to reduce the emissions responsible for climate change and mitigate the effects of global warming such as rising sea levels and drought.

But "it is still going to require more work and more confidence-building and greater trust between emerging countries, the least developed countries and the developed countries before I think you are going to see another legally binding treaty," the president said. "This is a classic example of a situation where if we just waited for that, then we would not make any progress."

The "consensus" includes agreement on how to tackle climate change, how industrialized countries would help developing countries pay for such mitigation and how to make the costly emission-cutting efforts transparent to prevent countries from cheating to gain trade advantages, Obama said.

It was the "transparency" issue, however, that remained the cloudiest.

To sell new limits on U.S. industry at home, the Obama administration needs to show competing countries are taking the same steps, and the White House has described transparency as imperative. China, now the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, opposed the inclusion of a mandatory outside verification regime. And though Obama suggested the accord was a direct result of last-minute meetings he held with the leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa, this was a dispute they apparently couldn't overcome.

The president said participating countries would list their gas-cutting efforts and goals in an annex to the accord. Though there's no formal way to verify these efforts on the ground, "we can actually monitor a lot of what takes place through satellite imagery and so forth. So I think we're going to have a pretty good sense of what countries are doing," he added.

The gas-cutting goals themselves were also unclear. Several environmental groups denounced the lack of action after a week of talk, and officials from the European Union – which has already pledged to make significant cuts – expressed disappointment at the results.

"It is now clear there won't be a comprehensive accord," Italian Environment Minister Stefania Prestigiacomo told The Wall Street Journal. "There will be a text that refers to next year for a comprehensive agreement."

For the U.S., the achievement of any agreement was being treated as a success.

"From the perspective of the developing countries like China and India, they're saying to themselves, per capita our carbon footprint remains very small, and we have hundreds of millions of people who don't even have electricity yet, so for us to get bound by a set of legal obligations could potentially curtail our ability to develop, and that's not fair," Obama said. "So I think that you have a fundamental deadlock in perspectives that were brought to the discussions during the course of this week."