Emailing "Copenhagen Chief Quits, India and China Join in Accord"
For reasons not officially announced, the U.N. official in charge of last year's Copenhagen
climate change summit, Yvo de Boer, has quit to pursue a more lucrative career in academe and business consulting. The speculation surrounding his resignation is that he was extremely frustrated with the outcome of the Copenhagen summit, which by most accounts was a near total failure, with the only saving grace a non-binding protocol that "takes note" of global warming and an agreement by countries to register steps they intend to take to address the problem.
Most attendees at the conference had signed on to the protocol. After all, it's completely non-binding, only requiring nations to "take note" of it by signing, and requiring nations to submit their carbon reduction plans to a central repository, where it is neither analyzed, critiqued, or assessed for effectiveness or enforcement. Nonetheless,
India and China, who played a critical role in slowing down the negotiations and ultimately may have succeeded in scuttling them, only agreed
yesterday to even participate in the accord by "allowing" their names to be listed on it.
The European Union, which has been a major proponent of international standards for climate change to replace the Kyoto Protocols,
welcomed the move while reiterating its support for a "robust and legally binding" agreement out of the successor summit on
climate action in Mexico later this year.
In spite of the news that China and India have joined the nearly 200 countries in signing the accord, it's plain as daylight to just about everyone that the accord is meaningless without follow-up. Whether or not the Mexico convention can yield a more robust agreement to tackle carbon emissions, at this point, remains extremely doubtful.