Copenhagen: World leaders dish out toothless climate change deal

©Twiggs Bakery and Coffeehouse

THE Copenhagen climate change conference was a bit like a stale Danish pastry served at a fancy coffee shop - dry, unfulfilling and failing to live up to expectation.

The two week COP15 which reached its anticlimax on Saturday of last week was a chance for politicians to save the world's bacon - preferably unsmoked - and forge a roadmap for cutting global CO2 emissions.

But despite hours of wrangling and bickering, world leaders failed to agree on a binding treaty to replace the 1997 Koyoto Agreement - instead launching the flimsy, hastily put together Copenhagen Accord.

The new deal, thrashed out by the USA, China, India, Brazil and South Africa, like a bunch of countries teaming up in the Eurovision Song Contest aside from the 193 other nations is merely an acknowledgement and fails to enforce laws to slash carbon emissions by 50% by 2050, as set out in earlier drafts.

Although there is a recognition to limit global warming to 2°C above pre-industrialised temperatures, and a promise to donate $30bn (£18.5bn) for developing countries in the next three years, rising to £100bn a year by 2020, this is a drop in the ocean and far too long and drawn out.

Meanwhile, despite unveiling methods to measure emissions in developing countries there is nothing to measure targets in the Third World (due to outrage from China) so how can we reliably keep tabs on progress?

President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jinatoa. © Kevin Lamarque/Reuters.

But the conference was dead in the water before the first delegates even arrived. Leaked emails from theUniversity of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit from unsrupulous scientists did the "trick" in dangling a red herring in front of climate change sceptics eager to discredit the theory, and the slimey attempt by Danish Premier Lars Lokke Rasmussen to select a core group of "important" countries was as slippery as a smoked eel.

The conference left me with a bad taste in my mouth - science aside, we have reached a period where people realise their actions are having an affect on the environment of the planet we come home. This was a chance for world leaders to pull together to promote renewable energy sources and globally sustainability and they failed. If politicians cannot agree then how do they expect the every day man in the street to embrace a greener life?

Meanwhile developing countries need extra investment to help to cut their emissions, espcially in the case of China, where pollution pouring out of their factories to manufacture goods and materials for our overbloated, commercialised Western lifestyles.

Like a stale Danish pastry served in a fancy coffee shop we should protest, stand firm and demand the waiter bring us something more satisfactory.

Banksy artwork near Oval bridge, Camden, London. © Zac Hussein/PA