Copenhagen update 4 – Obama underwhelms

My last few hours in Copenhagen. As I write this there’s a little over two hours till my train leaves the station. But as the climate change conference moves on from Cop15 it seems that the chances of a meaningful agreement disappeared long ago.

It’s still possible that some kind of deal will be signed, but it now looks impossible that it will commit either to substantial emission cuts or to the kind of financing that developing countries need. When Barak Obama rose to speak from the Bella Center, the atmosphere at the Klimaforum was hushed. Many people were still hoping for a change of position from the US, but all we got was a restatement of the familiar lines – a 17% by 2020, a pledge of $10bn, and commitments on accountability. We’ve heard this all before, and it’s wildly inadequate.

Even the rhetoric was toned down – there was a welcome recognition that “this is not fiction, this is science”, and that previous rounds of negotiations and agreements have achieved next to nothing. But after that, the speech ended with a damp squib of a message – let’s just all recognise that we’re not going to get what we want, and settle for what we can salvage from this wreck of a conference. Those weren’t his exact words of course, but that’s what it boiled down to. As one activist put it, “was that it? He could have made a bigger impact by leaving Air Force One at home”.

It’s a sad truth that while the science of climate change has moved on dramaically and the impact on many thousands of people around the world is already palpable, the politics is still stuck with short term national self interest. Far too many countries are still doing what the US has been doing for years – blocking any chance of real action.

This lunchtime the Fossil of the Year Award was given to… surprise surprise… Canada, here shown in the person of Stephen Harper accepting the accolade for the country which has done most to scupper a deal:

Part of that shame is due to the UK too – we own the banks which are investing in Canada’s tar sands, like the RBS, yet the UK Government has done absolutely nothing to take responsibility for this, any more than they will take publicly owned banks’ money out of the arms trade, or out of any of the countless forms of economic and environmental exploitation we’re currently funding around the world.

Very soon after Labour came to office, the commitment to an “ethical foreign policy” was reduced to a sick joke. Now the hypocrisy has been taken to a new level, as Gordon Brown tries to strike a progressive pose on the world stage yet allows nationalised banks to pursue investment policies utterly devoid of any tinge of conscience.