Obama counts climate gains

Dec. 24: The US President, Mr Barack Obama, says people are “justified” in being disappointed at the Copenhagen outcome, but at least he was able to secure non-binding agreements from what he called world’s would be largest emitters, India and China.
“I think that people are justified in being disappointed about the outcome in Copenhagen,” he said on Wednesday in an interview with PBS, admitting that the non-binding agreements reached at last week’s climate change talks did not “move us the way we needed.”
“The science says that we’ve got to significantly reduce emissions over the next 40 years. There’s nothing in the Copenhagen deal that ensures that happens,” he said. “What I said was essentially that rather than see a complete collapse in Copenhagen in which nothing at all got done and would have been a huge backward step,” he said.
Mr Obama explained how the non-binding agreement with India, China, Brazil and South Africa was reached: “What did occur was that at a point where there was about to be complete breakdown, and the Prime Minister of India (Manmohan Singh) was heading to the airport and the Chinese representatives were essentially skipping negotiations, and everybody’s screaming, what did happen was, cooler heads prevailed,” he said.
Mr Obama was unable to get leaders to commit to a deadline of 2010 for a legally binding international climate change treaty.