THE LEFT HASN'T GONE THIS CRAZY SINCE DICK CHENEY DROWNED ALL THOSE BLACK FOLKS IN NEW ORLEANS:

Copenhagen Accord is branded "abject failure" by activists (Deutsche Welle, 12/19/09)

Greenpeace condemned conference participants for failing to achieve a meaningful deal and likened representatives to criminals "fleeing to the airport in shame."

"World leaders had a once in a generation chance to change the world for good, to avert catastrophic climate change," said the group's international head Kumi Naidoo.

Development charity Oxfam said the accord "could not even be called a deal."

Scientists unhappy

German climate scientists also voiced their extreme disappointment.

"I am utterly disappointed," said Mojib Latif of the IFM-GEOMAR Leibniz Institute for Oceanography in Kiel. "Nothing substantial has come out of this. In fact it's a lot less than one might have expected in one's worst nightmares."

The Truths Copenhagen Ignored (Johann Hari, 19 December, 2009, The Independent)

So that's it. The world's worst polluters – the people who are drastically altering the climate – gathered here in Copenhagen to announce they were going to carry on cooking, in defiance of all the scientific warnings.

They didn't seal the deal; they sealed the coffin for the world's low-lying islands, its glaciers, its North Pole, and millions of lives.

Those of us who watched this conference with open eyes aren't surprised. Every day, practical, intelligent solutions that would cut our emissions of warming gases have been offered by scientists, developing countries and protesters – and they have been systematically vetoed by the governments of North America and Europe.

With Climate Agreement, Obama Guts Progressive Values (Bill McKibben, 19 December, 2009, Grist.org)

The President of the United States did several things with his agreement today with China, India, and South Africa:

He blew up the United Nations. The idea that there’s a world community that means something has disappeared tonight. The clear point is, you poor nations can spout off all you want on questions like human rights or the role of women or fighting polio or handling refugees. But when you get too close to the center of things that count—the fossil fuel that’s at the center of our economy—you can forget about it. We’re not interested. You’re a bother, and when you sink beneath the waves, we don’t want to hear much about it. The dearest hope of the American right for 50 years was essentially realized because in the end coal is at the center of America’s economy.

Back later, gotta go shovel some coal into the snow blower....

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 19, 2009 1:01 PM