Mr. Obama's inexplicable injunction Friday that "the time for talk is over" appears, in other words, to have produced an agreement to continue talking. The previous 12 days of frantic sound and pointless fury showed that there isn't anything approaching an international consensus on carbon control. What Copenhagen offered instead was a lesson in limits for a White House partial to symbolic gestures and routinely disappointed by reality.
However, the successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol became a pre-emptive dead letter because countries like China, Brazil and India said they were unwilling to accept anything that depressed their economic growth.
At Copenhagen the emerging economies nonetheless proved skilled at exploiting the West's carbon guilt, and in exchange for the nonconcession of continuing to negotiate next year, or the year after that, they'll receive up to $100 billion in foreign aid by 2020. The U.S. will presumably contribute the lion's share, though that has also been left to future negotiations. We can't wait to hear Mr. Obama tell Americans that he wants them to pay higher taxes so the U.S. can pay China to become more energy efficient and thus more economically competitive.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...809749004.html
Western world (OECD) is about to slit its economic throat and bleeding heart liberals are standing up and cheering. The Great White Liberal Guilt strikes again.