Word: copenhagen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Despite some wavering, key developing nations including China and India pledged their support for the deal, known as the Copenhagen Accord, by the deadline, reiterating their domestic plans to curb the growth of carbon emissions by improving energy efficiency. Europe, reliably, came on board with a promise to cut carbon emissions 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. And the U.S. confirmed its Copenhagen pledge to reduce its own emissions 17% below 2005 levels...
...that's the optimistic view. The reality is that even though governments at Copenhagen agreed to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2°C this century, the carbon-emissions cuts they've promised are not nearly steep enough to achieve that goal. And while tens of billions of dollars have been pledged to help developing nations cut carbon and adapt to climate change, the mechanism for delivering that money isn't clear...
...also looking unlikely that the U.S. Senate will pass carbon-capping legislation anytime soon - Obama lost a key vote for cap and trade when Republican Scott Brown won the late Senator Ted Kennedy's seat in a special election in Massachusetts - and that could potentially invalidate the U.S. Copenhagen pledge and throw the continuing international climate talks into further disarray. "Unless [the U.S.] is serious about its own commitments, there will be a very serious impact on the talks," said Rae Kwon Chung, South Korea's ambassador on climate change. (See the world's most polluted places...
...international negotiations will continue this year, culminating again in the annual U.N. climate summit at year's end, to be held in Cancún, Mexico, in November. (At the very least, if thousands of attendees are forced to wait in line outside for hours, as they were in Copenhagen, they'll get a nice tan.) Further complicating any attempt at progress is the growing sense that the U.N. process itself needs to be overhauled, especially after a handful of obstructionist countries managed to slow the Copenhagen negotiations to a crawl...
...month and a half after Copenhagen, the world finds itself in much the same place it has been for over a decade, still talking about the need to strike a grand global climate bargain. "It's fair to say that Copenhagen did not produce the full agreement the world needs to address the collective climate challenge," UNFCCC executive secretary Yvo de Boer told reporters on Jan. 20. "The window of opportunity to come to grips with the issue is closing at the same rate as before." At a minimum, the response to the Copenhagen Accord showed that the most powerful...