Links
Obama's climate accord fails the test
World leaders late last night agreed a hugely watered-down version of a new global pact on climate change, after an astonishing day of deadlock, disagreement, misunderstandings, walkouts and insults at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen.
The agreement, patched together after massive and rancorous divisions between the rich nations and the developing countries, especially America and China, was described as a "meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough" by the US President Barack Obama. However, a senior American official openly admitted it was not enough to combat the threat of a warming planet, saying merely: "It is a first step."
Known as the Copenhagen Accord, the new agreement falls massively short of the ambitions many people had centred on the two-week meeting in the Danish capital, in the hope of a major new effort to combat the global warming threat.