A healthy thing happened among the hype. Despite Nobel Laureate Gore and Australian PM Rudd making many wrong and grandiose claims, the US has had substantial influence on the outcomes.
Over two weeks, the US has worked to the sensible position of providing no concrete numbers regarding limiting the little understood contribution of greenhouse gasses. Some radicals have asserted the need for economy crippling, useless gestures of some 40% reduction in carbon dioxide.
US won out, but the media have still proclaimed a victory for greens. Figures.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Mixed Result Proclaimed As Triumph
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Surprise agreement ends Bali climate talks
By Maria Hawthorne
A NEW agreement on tackling climate change was forged late this afternoon when the United States caved in and agreed to support the Bali roadmap.
The US concession - 14 hours after the initial deadline passed - came after two weeks of talks and a day of high drama, in which conference head Yvo de Boer stormed out in tears and American delegates were booed and jeered.
"We will go forward and join consensus," US lead negotiator Paula Dobriansky told the 190-nation meeting to cheers and applause from the exhausted delegates.
Delegates rose to their feet and clapped and cheered as conference president Rachmat Witoelar banged down his gavel and declared that the roadmap had been adopted.
The breakthrough came less than 90 minutes after Australia's lead negotiator, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, said an agreement looked unlikely but promised to keep working for consensus.
"We know that building a global consensus on this issue of climate change will not be easy ... but Australia is here for the long haul," Senator Wong said.
"We said that we would play a constructive role now and in the future and that is precisely what Australia has done."
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono took the extraordinary step of addressing the delegates, urging them to compromise in the interests of the world.
And Mr de Boer, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), was given a standing ovation after he returned to the hall in the Bali International Convention Centre after earlier breaking down and leaving the gruelling negotiations.
Delegates agreed to launch talks on a new global warming pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol in 2012, including nations which had not ratified Kyoto such as the US.
Planet forgets it was Wong what saved it
by Andrew Bolt
Australian Associated Press talks up the Rudd Government’s role in getting the Bali (non-)deal on climate change:
Australia’s Climate Change Minister Penny Wong played a central role in the Bali negotiations, co-chairing the Ad-hoc Working Group meeting, where the agreement was struck.
The Australian also bought the Rudd spin:
AUSTRALIA’S newly installed Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, was last night leading last-ditch negotiations in Bali to rescue a global climate change deal.
But few fell as hard for this story of Wong as planet saver than did the Age‘s Michelle Grattan, who wrote like one infatuated:
Penny Wong might claim an Oscar for her role as supporting actor in Bali. The young tyro minister became one of the key negotiators in the search for compromise at the climate change conference.
Er, there is a substantial difference between chairing one of the meetings and actually negotiating a deal between superpowers. Which probably explains why the contribution of Wong, the “tyro” who played a “central role” as a “key negotiator”, was completely missed by all the big newspapers of record overseas.
In fact, every one of our astonishingly large deletation of six Government ministers could have stayed at home, for all the notice the big foreign media took of our contribution in their summing up how the final deal was struck.
Check for yourself. No mention of Wong’s work in the Guardian, the International Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times , or the Times of London.
London’s Sunday Telegraph also overlooked Wong’s role completely, and singled out instead that of Russia, who turns out to have done what everyone - including the Rudd Government - is happily blaming on the American scapegoats instead:
Russia is to blame for the fact that the agreement contained no figure for the “deep cuts” needed in carbon emissions, The Sunday Telegraph has learned.
So what on earth persuaded the star-struck Australian reporters in Bali, almost every one a warming disciple, that Wong was a big player? Were they spun, or did they just spin themselves?
Truth is, Wong was utterly eclipsed in the final negotiations by a delegate from one of our more insignificant neighbors who gained instant international fame for his sharp tongue:
Kevin Conrad, the negotiator from Papua New Guinea, rebuked the American delegation. “If for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us,” he said. “Please, get out of the way.”
And in one of the very rare summaries that mentioned Australia at all, the Rudd Government was actually fingered (by Time magazine) as a blocker, and not the deal-maker the Rudd Government led its media followers to believe:
Throughout the negotiations the U.S. — with help, at least until the last night, from Canada, Australia and Japan — blocked attempts to make climate diplomacy match the urgency of climate science.
And for all the self-serving hype about a crucial deal being reached in Bali, it took the representative of tiny Grenada, not naive Australia, to nail the past two weeks for the charade they were:
Angus Friday of Grenada, who represents small island states, said the “Bali roadmap” was disappointing and could have been agreed by e-mail instead of sending more than 10,000 delegates on carbon-spewing jets for two weeks to Bali.
Bottom line: The Australian media is utterly credulous when fed warming spin. It is also too credulous when fed Rudd spin. And when it’s fed Rudd spin on warming, you can build a mushroom farm on the results.
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