Great commentary from the Guardian

Copenhagen negotiators bicker and filibuster while the biosphere burns
George Monbiot
The Guardian (UK)
19 December 2009

First they put the planet in square brackets, now they have deleted it
from the text. At the end it was no longer about saving the biosphere: it
was just a matter of saving face. As the talks melted down, everything
that might have made a new treaty worthwhile was scratched out. Any deal
would do, as long as the negotiators could pretend they have achieved
something. A clearer and less destructive treaty than the text that
emerged would be a sheaf of blank paper, which every negotiating party
solemnly sits down to sign.

This was the chaotic, disastrous denouement of a chaotic and disastrous
summit. The event has been attended by historic levels of incompetence.
Delegates arriving from the tropics spent 10 hours queueing in sub-zero
temperatures without shelter, food or drink, let alone any explanation or
announcement, before being turned away. Some people fainted from exposure;
it's surprising that no one died. The process of negotiation was just as
obtuse: there was no evidence here of the innovative methods of dispute
resolution developed recently by mediators and coaches, just the same old
pig-headed wrestling.

Watching this stupid summit via webcam (I wasn't allowed in either), it
struck me that the treaty-making system has scarcely changed in 130 years.
There's a wider range of faces, fewer handlebar moustaches, frock coats or
pickelhaubes, but otherwise, when the world's governments try to decide
how to carve up the atmosphere, they might have been attending the
conference of Berlin in 1884. It's as if democratisation and the flowering
of civil society, advocacy and self-determination had never happened.
Governments, whether elected or not, without reference to their own
citizens let alone those of other nations, assert their right to draw
lines across the global commons and decide who gets what. This is a
scramble for the atmosphere comparable in style and intent to the scramble
for Africa.

At no point has the injustice at the heart of multilateralism been
addressed or even acknowledged: the interests of states and the interests
of the world's people are not the same. Often they are diametrically
opposed. In this case, most rich and rapidly developing states have sought
through these talks to seize as great a chunk of the atmosphere for
themselves as they can – to grab bigger rights to pollute than their
competitors. The process couldn't have been better designed to produce the
wrong results.

I spent most of my time at the Klimaforum, the alternative conference set
up by just four paid staff, which 50,000 people attended without a hitch.
(I know which team I would put in charge of saving the planet.) There the
barrister Polly Higgins laid out a different approach. Her declaration of
planetary rights invests ecosystems with similar legal safeguards to those
won by humans after the second world war. It changes the legal
relationship between humans, the atmosphere and the biosphere from
ownership to stewardship. It creates a global framework for negotiation
which gives nation states less discretion to dispose of ecosystems and the
people who depend on them.

Even before the farce in Copenhagen began it was looking like it might be
too late to prevent two or more degrees of global warming. The nation
states, pursuing their own interests, have each been passing the parcel of
responsibility since they decided to take action in 1992. We have now lost
17 precious years, possibly the only years in which climate breakdown
could have been prevented. This has not happened by accident: it is the
result of a systematic campaign of sabotage by certain states, driven and
promoted by the energy industries. This idiocy has been aided and abetted
by the nations characterised, until now, as the good guys: those that have
made firm commitments, only to invalidate them with loopholes, false
accounting and outsourcing. In all cases immediate self-interest has
trumped the long-term welfare of humankind. Corporate profits and
political expediency have proved more urgent considerations than either
the natural world or human civilisation. Our political systems are
incapable of discharging the main function of government: to protect us
from each other.

Goodbye Africa, goodbye south Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral
reefs and rainforest. It was nice knowing you. Not that we really cared.
The governments which moved so swiftly to save the banks have bickered and
filibustered while the biosphere burns.