You don't have to run your search engine too long to discover it's the blogs where you'll find the most interesting information about what emerged from the Copenhagen climate talks. But that's not where we're going tonight. Instead, what follows are links to the headlines and first three paragraphs of numerous English-language newspaper Web sites, and a couple of news services. Some of those excerpts about the five-nation Copenhagen Accord are long, some are short. A handful of headlines and links to foreign-language papers is also included.
The overall message is not as soothing as the press releases.
Add your own newspapers if you like. If you speak languages other than English, a translation will be appreciated by other Kossacks.
From the Guardian:
Low targets, goals dropped: Copenhagen ends in failure:
The UN climate summit reached a weak outline of a global agreement last night in Copenhagen, falling far short of what Britain and many poor countries were seeking and leaving months of tough negotiations to come.
After eight draft texts and all-day talks between 115 world leaders, it was left to Barack Obama and Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, to broker a political agreement. The so-called Copenhagen accord "recognises" the scientific case for keeping temperature rises to no more than 2C but did not contain commitments to emissions reductions to achieve that goal.
American officials spun the deal as a "meaningful agreement", but even Obama said: "This progress is not enough."
From The Australian:
Copenhagen Accord rescued from 'abyss', says Australia's Prime Minister:
PRIME MINISTER Kevin Rudd said world leaders had brought global climate negotiations back from the "abyss" after 17 hours of continual discussions that ended at 1am in the Danish capital city today.
But Australia’s Prime Minister conceded that the final Copenhagen Accord left "much more to be done".
As it stands, the accord simply describes Australia’s current emission reduction target range of 5 per cent to 25 per cent in the political agreement. Mr Rudd said Australia would announce its final target once all nations had submitted their targets by February 1.
From Agence France-Presse:
Climate activists declare Copenhagen agreement a disaster:
Environmental campaigners branded the Copenhagen climate summit an abject failure, saying it made progress on financing the battle against climate change but little else.
President Barack Obama announced the deal at the end of the 12-day, UN-led meeting in the Danish capital, calling an agreement among key leaders "unprecedented" but conceding that it was not enough. His announcement was made late on Friday Copenhagen time.
Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International, called Copenhagen "an abject failure."
From the Washington Post:
World leaders reach deal on climate change in Copenhagen:
President Obama said Friday night that an international deal to combat climate change had been reached, but "it is going to be very hard, and it's going to take some time" to get to a legally binding treaty.
"Today, we've made a meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough here in Copenhagen," Obama said.
The agreement, which appeared to fall short of even modest expectations for the talks, has not been endorsed yet by the full summit.
From the Los Angeles Times:
Tentative deal reached in Copenhagen on climate change curbs:
Key international leaders have reached a tentative deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and curb climate change, after the United States and China agreed to a method for recording developing nations' pledges to limit emissions and ensuring those pledges are carried out.
Details of the agreement were approved in an evening meeting with President Obama, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, sources said.
Obama has scheduled a press conference in the host Bella Center to unveil the agreement.
From The New York Times:
5 Nations Forge a Climate Deal, but Many Goals Remain Unmet:
President Obama announced here on Friday night that five major nations, including the United States, had together forged a climate deal. He called it "an unprecedented breakthrough" but acknowledged that it still fell short of what was required to combat global warming.
President Obama made statements following a meeting with Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao, the prime minister of India, Manmohan Singh, and other world leaders at the climate summit.
The agreement addresses many of the issues that leaders came here to settle. But it has left many of the participants in the climate talks unhappy, from the Europeans, who now have the only binding carbon control regime in the world, to the delegates from the poorest nations, who objected to being left out of the critical negotiations.
From the Sidney Morning Herald:
Compromise Copenhagen deal reached:
US President Barack Obama has announced a climate deal with other major world leaders calling it "unprecedented'' but still not enough to beat global warming.
More than four hours after the scheduled close of the summit and an exhaustive round of diplomacy between the world's most powerful leaders, Obama said an agreement had been reached but acknowledged it was limited and would not be legally binding.
The pact includes an agreement to put off until next month a decision on targets for reducing carbon emissions by 2020, a European diplomat said.
From the Telegraph:
Copenhagen climate summit: 'meaningful agreement' hailed by leaders:
US President Barack Obama reached a "meaningful" agreement with the leaders of China, India and South Africa at the Copenhagen climate conference.
The shift was described as an "historic step forward" but US officials made clear that it was not enough to stop the world warming up.
As details began to emerge, officials stressed that no country was "entirely satisfied" with what had been agreed.
From The Independent:
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. Although in principle it commits – for the first time – all the countries of the world, including the developing countries, to cut their emissions of the greenhouse gases which are causing climate change, the accord is not legally binding, merely a political statement.
From the (London) Times:
Copenhagen deadlock wrapped up as emissions deal:
The United Nations climate change summit ended last night without setting any emission reduction targets.
President Obama forged a non-binding agreement with his counterparts in China, India, Brazil and South Africa but it was unclear whether all 192 countries would accept the compromise text.
Mr Obama said that a "fundamental deadlock in perspectives" had overshadowed the negotiations. He described the deal as "meaningful" but admitted that it would not be enough to prevent global warming. "We have much further to go," he said.
From the Straits Times:
Deal reached: Obama
FOLLOWING are the main points in the draft deal agreed among leaders of more than two dozen countries at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen.
The text, called the Copenhagen Accord, is aimed at being a springboard to a worldwide pact on tackling climate change.
The draft - which delegates said would be put to a plenary session, presaging a rocky ride from nations deemed to have been excluded from the process - spelt out these provisions:
GLOBAL WARMING 'should be (kept) below 2 deg C', says the draft.
From the Toronto Star:
Copenhagen deal not binding:
Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other world leaders are leaving the Copenhagen climate talks with an outcome that is weaker than hoped for – and possibly in disarray – and a vow to work out the details later.
Harper said Friday that Canada, the United States, China and several other countries reached a "comprehensive and realistic" agreement, while U.S. President Barack Obama hailed it as a ``meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough."
But other leaders questioned Obama's interpretation of the outcome, and it wasn't immediately clear in the early hours of Saturday morning if a deal had actually been reached after 12 days of tempestuous talks in the Danish capital.
From the Vancouver Sun:
Obama reaches climate deal with China, India, S.Africa:
An international deal on global warming was reached late Friday, a last-minute breakthrough that was described as only a first step and insufficient to fight climate change.
"We have much farther to go," U.S. President Barack Obama said, adding that more trust would have to be built between rich and poor nations to reach a legally binding pact.
The talks went into overtime Friday, bolstered by hopeful discussions between the U.S. and China, but muddled by numerous confusing drafts of a new United Nations agreement swirling through the conference centre.
From The Montreal Gazette:
Limited, last-minute climate deal struck in Copenhagen:
World leaders attempted to pull all the meaning they could from the tenuous deal brokered between the U.S., China and other major economies during the final hours of climate change negotiations Friday night and Saturday morning — but the newly christened "Copenhagen Accord" elicited mainly resignation or disappointment.
The agreement is missing some of the hard targets contained in earlier drafts of the accord, but sets out an ambitious plan for providing $100 billion in climate aid to developing countries by 2020. U.S. President Barack Obama, who held a key bilateral meeting with China Friday afternoon to help usher through the deal, acknowledged "no country will get everything that it wants."
Although many exhausted politicians from industrialized countries said they planned to sign the agreement, there are still months — perhaps years — of negotiations ahead before the pact has any real impact.
From The Wall Street Journal:
Climate Pact Falls Short:
Leaders of the U.S., China and several other major economies said late Friday they had tentatively reached a new climate accord, though they said the pact wasn't aggressive enough to meaningfully curb greenhouse-gas emissions and merely set up a future round of negotiations to hash out the details.
The announcement followed a hectic day of diplomacy that included an approximately four-hour meeting that featured clashes between U.S. and Chinese officials. But the so-called "Copenhagen Accord" leaves key questions unanswered, and will likely have little immediate impact on companies in the U.S. and elsewhere that had hoped for more certainty about the future direction of regulation to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
The agreement was still subject late Friday to final ratification by nations at the conference.
From the Associated Press (via the Houston Chronicle):
Poor nations not happy with climate deal:
Two years of laborious negotiations on a climate agreement ended Friday with a political deal brokered by President Barack Obama with China and other emerging powers but denounced by poor countries because it was nonbinding and set no overall target for curbing greenhouse gas emissions.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a leading proponent of strong action to confront global warming, gave the Copenhagen Accord grudging acceptance but said she had "mixed feelings" about the outcome and called it only a first step.
Obama's day of frenetic diplomacy produced a three-page document promising $30 billion in emergency aid in the next three years and a goal of channeling $100 billion a year by 2020 to developing countries with no guarantees.
From the Cape News:
Obama: Imperfect deal is better than nothing:
US President Barack Obama on Friday told the world to stop bickering and embrace even an imperfect new climate deal, or risk a disastrous split that would let global warming advance unchallenged.
"I have to be honest, as the world watches us today, I think ability to take collective action is in doubt right now and it hangs in the balance," Obama told leaders in the cliffhanger final hours of the UN climate conference.
"At this point the question is whether we will move forward together or split apart, whether we prefer posturing to action."
From the Christian Science Monitor:
Copenhagen summit: Major powers broker compromise:
The United States and four other countries agreed to a new, voluntary climate pact today. The move, which could become the framework for a broader agreement here, drew responses ranging from cautious acceptance to outrage. But it could prove a historic development in big-power negotiations, say some analysts.
The announcement came at the end of nearly 24 hours of intense talks among nearly two dozen world leaders and their negotiators. In announcing the agreement to reporters from the United States, President Obama acknowledged that it falls short of what the science demands in order to hold global warming to roughly 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels.
But, he added, "it's a first step," one designed to overcome what he called a "deadlock in perspectives" between developed and developing countries and build the kind of confidence between the two camps that will eventually allow for a legally binding treaty.
From the New Zealand Herald:
Eleventh hour climate deal not enough - Key:
Big emitters are backing a deal for rich countries to slash emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 under a "Copenhagen accord" that is being hammered out in the dying minutes of climate talks.
The deal falls far short of what was hoped for from Copenhagen and leaves much to be agreed at a follow-up meeting in Mexico to be held sometime next year.
Frustrated leaders turned up to the final day of talks to find no agreed text on the table and spent the last 12 hours trying to reach an agreement.
From El Pais:
Las potencias resuelven la cumbre con un pacto climático insuficiente
From the Berliner Morgenpost:
Klimaschutzgipfel endet mit Minimal-Einigung
From Le Monde:
Dans la confusion, Copenhague s'achève sur un échec