Whatever led U.S. President Barack Obama to believe that his personal intercession at the climate-change summit would achieve something major, his very presence in Copenhagen made "a significant breakthrough" a political imperative, no matter how flimsy. And that's exactly what a senior Administration official called a last-ditch deal Friday night before Mr. Obama raced back home.
In the wake of Mr. Obama's "breakthrough" with China, India, South Africa and Brazil, the other 187 countries present took the conference into overtime, but couldn't bring themselves to do more than take notice of the sketchy accord and resolve to seriously consider moving forward the next climate-change conference scheduled for next year in Mexico City. In U.N. parlance, "taking notice" is the lowest level of recognition, equivalent to diplomatic disdain.
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.
The agreement is being sold as providing "the foundation for an eventual legally binding treaty," but that same "foundation" has been laid many times before. Copenhagen was supposed to deliver "legally binding" limits. 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.
Under the agreement, China has committed with everyone else to keeping temperature increases to no more than two degrees Celsius. But it tellingly ducked any obligation to cut emissions, despite being the world's number one emitter, and no wonder given the harm such limits would do to China's growing energy needs as it strives to join the world's ranks of industrial powers.
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.
Copenhagen also got hung up on whether countries (especially China) will be "transparent" about whether they are meeting their anticarbon commitments. The Obama Administration claims to be satisfied with the verification pact it struck with China, but China successfully blocked Western attempts to include international monitors of any future emissions targets.
We can understand China's position because nearly every country that ratified Kyoto cheats on it today. Honest carbon accounting would also impede programs like the corrupt "clean development mechanism," where European consumers end up paying Chinese companies for emissions reductions that either aren't real or would have happened anyway. At least Copenhagen's talk did less tangible harm.