Dark clouds gather over Copenhagen deal

Unfortunately, they were the wrong countries — they included mostly the small, poor countries who have little economic or political clout.

These countries will be the first victims of climate change, and many of them already face rising seas or spreading drought as a result of global warming.

They remained largely unimpressed by Western promises.

Partly they were unimpressed because the money is considerably less – by a factor of three or four – than some recent estimates of the cost both of the damage they will suffer from climate change and of their transition to more renewable energy sources.

And partly they were resistant because much was left vague — Clinton spoke of an unspecified mix of public, private, and “alternative” revenues to be raised jointly by all rich countries.

But mostly it was because they’d come to realise that there’s not enough money in the world to save your nation if the waves come over the seawalls, as may happen in island nations like Kiribati or delta regions like Bangladesh, or if the drought grows so severe that your pastures turn to desert, as has occurred in parts of Kenya.

Poor nations

“Development,” long the main demand of the poor nations, simply isn’t possible if their rivers are drying up. At this point, one African delegate told me, “any development is going to have to be green development.”

And so — for much longer than expected — these poor nations continued to press the case for dramatic emissions reductions from the rich world as the only guarantee of their survival.

Since Obama is clearly more interested in action on climate than his predecessors were, it’s easy to fix blame for his chary rhetoric, and America’s inaction, on Congress and to say that the president’s hands were tied.

We can’t know for sure whether he could have made more progress on Capitol Hill if he’d pushed harder, though that’s what many environmentalists have contended.

All we can say with certainty is that in Copenhagen he offered no new targets beyond the quite weak ones his congressional majority had put in the first drafts of the legislation now working its way through Congress.

McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and the author of “The End of Nature” and “Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.”