Stern: Copenhagen Neared Complete Collapse

Photo courtesy of US Department of State, via <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/statephotos/4176289409/">Flickr</a>.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


The agreement reached at the Copenhagen summit last month might not have been the successful deal on climate that many had hoped for. But it was a victory in the sense that the climate talks “came within a hair’s breadth of collapse,” climate envoy Todd Stern said on Thursday.

In his first public remarks since the conclusion of the summit, Stern said that late as Wednesday evening, “it looked as though we were headed for failure.” It was apparently so bad that the State Department drafted a failure speech for President Obama to use on the final day, as fellow negotiator Jonathan Pershing noted earlier this week. Stern described a meeting starting at 11:30 on Thursday night—literally the 11th hour, as the summit was supposed to conclude on Friday—between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Australian Prime Minster Kevin Rudd, Mexican President Felipe Calderone, South African President Jacob Zuma, Brazilian President Luiz Lula da Silva, and others “sitting around a table and trying to not let this negotiation go down.” The leaders adjourned at 2:30 a.m. without reaching any significant breakthrough.

In the conference’s final hours, leaders were “personally rolling up their sleeves and taking over the process of negotiation,” Stern said. “It was just really a refusal on the part of these leaders to have a non-result.” But there was little progress until the final, “fairly dramatic” meeting between Obama, China, India, South Africa, and Brazil late on Friday night, he said. Stern played up Obama’s personal participation in those final meetings. “I don’t think there would have been an agreement without his personal intervention,” he said. (Stern cited this intervention as evidence of Obama’s commitment to the issue domestically as well, promising a “significant effort on the part of all in the administration to press forward.”)

Of course, those final meetings at Copenhagen prompted some developing countries to charge that the final deal was shoved on them—which is why the assembled nations merely “noted” the accord rather than formally adopted it. Stern said it will become evident in the next few weeks whether or not Copenhagen really acheived anything meaningful, as countries are expected to sign on to the final document and list their respective commitments by Jan. 31. “The accord is lumbering down the runway,” Stern concluded. “We need to get enough speed for it to take off.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate