President Barack Obama spoke on the last day of climate talks at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. The President called on all major economies to put forward decisive national actions that will reduce their emissions and turn the corner on climate change.
Excerpt From NYT’s ClimateWire, By DARREN SAMUELSOHN AND LISA FRIEDMAN
Obama Tries to Rally U.N. Climate Conference, but Deadlock Persists
Behind the scenes, dozens of presidents and prime ministers worked on a three-page document that they hope will become the lone outcome of the two-week negotiations here.
But the blame game is also under way with more than 115 heads of state in Copenhagen — many with years of work and their prestige on the line — struggling to bridge a divide between the world’s rich and poor nations. Several major industrialized countries pointed the finger at China for balking at demands to ensure their emission commitments would be open for public scrutiny.
A hush fell over the entire Bella Center during Obama’s eight-minute speech (pdf). He took on climate skeptics with his opening words and then made an all-out push for a collective agreement.
“While the reality of climate change is not in doubt, I have to be honest, as the world watches us today, I think our ability to take collective action is in doubt right now and it hangs in the balance,” he said. “I believe we can act boldly, and decisively, in the face of a common threat. That is why I have come here today. Not to talk, but to act.”
But with nearly 200 countries handing the negotiations over to their heads of state after two brutal weeks of gridlock, those talks have yet to bear any fruit.
China’s leader ignores compromise meeting
Obama and 19 other world leaders, including British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, met for about 90 minutes in the Bella Center trying to find a compromise.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao boycotted the meeting and instead sent his vice foreign minister, He Yafei. In remarks to reporters, Sarkozy noted the protocol breach and said an agreement remained out of reach because of Beijing’s resistance to emissions monitoring.
Read the rest of the story at the New York Times: Obama Tries to Rally U.N. Climate Conference, but Deadlock Persists
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Where to begin? First there are the climate change howlers, but I won’t bother with those. The one idea that keeps recurring is about “job creation” – those millions of “green jobs” that will be so good for America. There seems to be some disconnect with his main thesis, because he then states that these new sustainable energy forms will be more efficient. If that is the case, why do they need massive government subsidies before they can happen?
Knowing that this is a lie, and these “sustainable” energies represent the least efficient forms of energy other than bestial forms, it is clear that in as much as more “green” jobs can be created by government fiat, these jobs will by necessity be unproductive jobs.
President Obama, therefore, is making a speech promising to move Americans into unproductive jobs. But this is ok, because they will be “green” and unemployment will be cut at a stroke. The reality is that, if such a stategy is employed, Americans will produce less wealth per man hour than at present and as such become poorer. Hallelujah.
If the commons understood what their president has planned on their behalf, they would be waiting outside the Whitehouse with pitchforks and flaming torches.
Add this bit too – “The extent of crisis in the talks has taken leaders by surprise.” Ha! Morons!!! Anyone with even a shred of honesty saw this coming from miles away!!!
And now this – all the activists, the true believers in Hope’n’change are now facing the fact that they bought into a fraud.
Remember how for days now the word has been that “Obama will come and save the conference!” What’s so funny is that they really believed this! Of course, The One is now going to find out that dispointed people can be very bitter indeed:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/18/obama-speech-copenhagen
“We have charted our course, we have made our commitments, and we will do what we say,” Obama said.
“But in the absence of any evidence of that commitment the words rang hollow and there was a palpable sense of disappointment in the audience.”
“Friends of the Earth said in a statement, “Obama has deeply disappointed not only those listening to his speech at the UN talks, he has disappointed the whole world.”
>>Copenhagen: India and China have taken a united stand and walked out of the climate summit as Copenhagen talks fail.
Told ya, reports of a deal were way too premature and we have China and India for saving our bacon.
Scientific enquiry and climate propaganda ought to be distinguished and are not the same thing. In that respect, Obama doesn’t have scientific advisers. If he did, they would be Veizer, Roy Spencer, Lindzen et al, and quite a few scientists who published prior to 1995.
The present consensus is not science. It could be described as pseudo scientific propaganda, which is more apt to meet a crossroads with political motives. There is an inverse ratio between man playing god and his level of incompetance, the more foolish he is, the more he plays infallible, although ignorance begets hostility to critics, even when those critics are correct.
What will be their master’s punishment? ….Dark forces should change strategies after firing their overused servants…
What is “an increase acceleration of the climate change phenomenon” ? Because apparantly we have one. Is it an accelerating psychological state? Is it a metaphor? Does Obama know because he said it? Did his science advisers give him the phrase or is it his own post-normal scientific term? Or is he referring to the increasing negative acceleration in temperature, the increasing negative acceleration on Arctic sea-ice or the increasing sceptical awareness arising from all the double speak?
Just come back from pushing several inches of snow along my path for the first time in many years (S.E. England) and find out our ‘leaders’ , including Gordon Clown himself, still hard at work trying to make the world colder. Nice to know that the UK Government is borrowing billions of pounds in a good cause.
I appreciate how The President honors 350.org in a unique way: by looking down at his notes 350 times! This is also 350 times more than I have ever seen him look down in his “first year” (or in the “zeroeth year” on the campaign trail for that matter). Glad I took the time to watch.
Also, since this is my first post, I will say that my new desktop pic is the throng horde of snowmen from the other day. Classic.
And China, following Confucious saying: “just waiting at the front door for the corpse to pass by…”
We are living in interesting times, and in these times, even Shakespeare was wrong…Now the stars are driving the human affairs, and THEY can not do anything!!
Obama says:
“All of you would not be here unless the threat was real”
Hookers take real money. reporters are paid real money to get a story. Limo drivers go for the money. Not some altruistic ordeal.
Obama is full of it. Reducing our emissions by 17% by 2020 means we will have to reverse population growth. Who will step up and loan America money so we can give 100 billion a year?
“mitigation transparency and financing” “It is a clear formula”.
Chicago way is to do a shakedown.
Obama is posturing and accuses the rest of them.
It’s all becoming clear, #Copenhagen was one big Communist Confab. The Communists are back after almost two decades in cryogenic freeze.
Wait, wait! There will be a lot of warm!…They will be burned at the stake of oblivion
Hurrah!
“Sarkozy noted the protocol breach and said an agreement remained out of reach because of Beijing’s resistance to emissions monitoring.”
——————————
Maybe the Chinese can set on the compromise of naming Phil Jones head of the emissions disclosure commission and Mann, CO2 emissions monitoring chief officer ?
Jean Parisot: Yes, that is why the EU is so frantic
Håkan B: What did he do? He was acting.
I am sure it is all the fault of the Bush administration somehow.
Let’s annotate just the first paragraph of the President’s speech:
1. A group which includes their excellencies Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chavez, to name but two.
2. This is mistake number one already.
3. I hope “like me” means “as I,” unless he were merely making a jussive appeal to admire him.
4. Really? If I were a despotic leader of a country made impoverished by corrupt, cruel and imprudent policies would I stay away from a conference whereat I might enrich myself and my confederates merely because I doubted that the UN and the IPCC were accurately describing the reality of supposed global warming? Charitably, then, I call this a naïve delusion rather than a lie; but it is still mistake number two.
5. Wrong, it is a fiction, not science, an egregious error of judgement, and mistake number three.
6. Unchecked, unnecessary and overly burdensome taxation, the abandonment of beneficial technologies and industries whilst conterminously yielding to tyrannous measures of unelected bureaucracies will indeed pose unacceptably perilous risks to our security, our economies, and our planet; mistake number four.
7. The proskynetic President asserts what is mistake number five: we do know that unchecked, alarmist nonsense promulgated by the UN’s Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide is extremely dangerous and, unfortunately, too readily accepted, unquestioningly, but “this distinguished group of leaders” and the accompanying plague of proctoleichous parasites and accomplices.
The President’s speech, alas, will be reported as wonderfully eloquent and intelligent, though it is merely meretriciously platitudinous and wrongheadedly contemptible.
Mrs Dansk Pastry reports from the, um, streets of Copenhagen.
Does anyone else get the impression that very few politicians and witch doctors and palm readers survived THE GREAT GOLBAL WARMING EVENT about 15,000 years ago? Those poor people! Imagine what they had to endure.
Let’s get the Red China thing out of the way, I lived in Hong Kong for years and travelled extensively in China, and the Far East, I never met a Chinese who was anything less than a 100% red blooded capitalist. For sure it’s not a democracy but it is a capitalist country big time and there was never anyway they were going to slow their rise to being the biggest economy in the world.
I have been surprised on how ineffective Obama has been, he can talk the talk, but he seems to be one of those people who tries to be all things to all men, but we have to be fair to him, he has to rely on his scientific advisers for his information, at least he didn’t refer to sceptics as “flat earthers” like the execrable Mr. Brown.
The AGW drama and many other phony events roll on — lights, action, camera — from the (fake) left and the (fake) right media. We have been “taught” to believe in a two party system that does not exist. Lead the opposition to control it –that is how this one body but two headed monster gets what it wants. Don’t believe in it and the real picture emerges clearly. Look past the all the mouthpieces to find the men behind the curtain manipulating this global stage play –follow the money as this production is a blockbuster and must be funded from very deep pockets.
Epic Failure is the Obama. I wonder who gets to make this fool into the joke that he is, SNL, Sarah Palin or the Bloggers. Maybe the Noble Prize for Biggest Liar would be appropriate. Next FAIL will be Marxist HealthCare!
@Jeremy (07:46:45) “Watch carefully everyone, witness what you see here at the end. … As someone who was raised inside a cult, I know only too well what that’s like, and how earth-shattering it is to realize you were thinking BS for a very long time.
They’re going to be very dazed and confused when they finally realize how wrong they are”
I’d really like to know what you recommend is best to do for the young people in our families in the West who believe all the AGW rubbish because they were filled up with this throughout their school days. I am worrying about one young relative; it is not her fault that she believes in AGW. Do we just wait patiently, kindly leaving them lots of “space” to work this out, or is it helpful to bring it up obliquely, casually in conversation, things like: “it must have been nice for the Roman centurions on duty on Hadrian’s Wall to be able to grow grapes, must have made them feel a bit more at home”; or “if CO2 rises and plant growth increases, do you think that we will be able to re-introduce the dinosaur that thrived for so many hundreds of years when CO2 levels were 18 times what they are now”.
The positive outcome of all this seems to prove that most people wise up faster than most politician, according to latest polls about the cause of climate change.
Mr. President, sorry for the following harsh words, but … shut yer pie hole!
Politicians do what they do best… throw money at non-problems. Nice job!