World leaders kick climate policy into the long grass

A summary of opinion related to the UN conference on climate in NYC

Collated by Benny Peiser.

Copenhagen was essentially sidelined yesterday at another event, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon’s Climate Change Summit in New York. There, along with Chinese leader Hu Jintao, U.S. President Barack Obama more or less shuffled climate control policy off into the great dreamscape of unattainable plans and long range objectives. Like equality for all and peace in our time, the world will have to wait for sweeping and binding climate policy.

–Terence Corcoran, Financial Post, 22 September 2009

The UN Climate Change Summit in New York managed to produce a concrete result. It has nothing to do with CO2 reduction targets, however, but with a simple political insight: Forget Copenhagen! The chances that the Copenhagen summit will deliver more than just a non-binding framework agreement decreased further on Tuesday. They now tend towards zero. Therefore, it would be best to postpone the climate conference until the United States is ready to agree to clear progress in negotiations. Otherwise, there is a real danger that a compromise formula in Copenhagen would make any progress impossible for years to come because the big climate sinners could hide behind the agreement.

–Editorial, Financial Times Deutschland, 22 September 2009

Initially, many climate activists had hoped this year would yield a pact in which nations would agree to cut their greenhouse gas emissions under the auspices of a legal international treaty. But recent announcements by China, Japan and other nations point to a different outcome of U.N. climate talks that will be held in December in Copenhagen: a political deal that would establish global federalism on climate policy, with each nation pledging to take steps domestically.

–Juliet Eilperin and Colum Lynch, The Washington Post, 23 September 2009

The significance of the Chinese proposal is that it indicates that China is willing to join Europe, the United States and others in a fantasyland of climate policy detached from policy reality. It is hard to believe how that outcome leads some to greater optimism on climate policy.

—Roger Pielke Jr, 31 August 2009

None of the alarmists and their supercomputer climate models ever predicted even a 30-year respite in their apocalyptic scenarios. Neither did they predict the sun, that thermonuclear furnace in the sky that has more influence on earth’s climate than any number of Ford Explorers, would suddenly go quiet for an indefinite period. Latif and others conclude that, at the very least, we have time to think about it and analyze and learn. We don’t have to fight global warming by inflicting global poverty. More things on Earth affect climate than are dreamed up in computer models.

—Investor’s Business Daily, 22 September 2009

If you want to know what I think is going on inside Prime Ministers’offices around the world, it’s ‘Let’s kick this into the long grass.’ Because that is what it will take to approach the problem. The short-termism is gone.

–Benny Peiser, LTT, 14 November 2008