While The Legacy Media Republicans Babbled about Bowing, Obama Rescued Copenhagen from the Dumpster

While the GOP/Media clowns were babbling about bowing, US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao were hammering out a climate-change deal in advance of the great Copenhagen climate summit.

Because of this deal, President Obama is now able to go to Copenhagen with the following good news:

The news that President Obama will seek a emissions target at global talks in Copenhagen has animated a once-moribund meeting and given hope to environmentalists that something tangible can come from them.

The emissions target is expected to correspond to numbers that have been discussed on Capitol Hill, namely a reduction of 17 to 20% below 2005 emissions levels by the year 2020.

This is a direct result of the meeting with China’s Hu Jintao and was expected by those news outlets that were actually paying attention instead of freaking out over bows. As I mentioned last week, both the US and China have now agreed to stop playing climate-change chicken.

And it’s not just China that’s agreed to join the US in working to curb emissions. Obama has met with the leaders of India as well, and got commitments from them on this.

This may be the most significant news of the last decade.

[UPDATE: And no, it's not too late. The economic downturn has bought us an extra 21 months in which to retool our economies to lower emissions. That's 21 extra months for China to retool the older, grossly inefficient and polluting steel factories it has idled because of the downturn. That's 21 extra months for India to do similar upgrades to its factories. That's 21 extra months for the US to do the same thing with its factories. Considering that these three nations account for 56% of the world's CO2 emissions, that's not a small thing.]

(Crossposted at Mercury Rising.)

Good News from Beijing, But It Won’t Be on Your TV

1:00 pm in Uncategorized by Phoenix Woman

Did you hear about the climate-change agreement President Obama just made with his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao? The one that the noted magazine Scientific American just touted as "More Important than Copenhagen"?

Unless you read SciAm on a regular basis, you probably didn’t. And that’s not your fault. The places where most Americans get most of their news — drive-time radio and the evening TV news — haven’t mentioned it.

Nor are they likely to mention another salient fact: That the Kyoto agreement, the one to which most other major industrialized nations subscribe (we didn’t because Bush wouldn’t, and China didn’t because we didn’t), is working quite well and cutting emissions right on schedule — and without hurting the economies of the signatories:

And note what hasn’t happened: the economies of the Kyoto signatory countries haven’t been hobbled by soaring energy prices. The trading mechanism hasn’t been fatally compromised by market manipulators. Industry hasn’t fled en masse to countries like China that lack binding emissions limits.

We can do better than Kyoto, and ultimately any effort to combat climate change will only be successful if it encompasses all the major emitting countries, including China, India, and Brazil. But the message from Europe’s experience couldn’t be simpler: cap-and-trade works.

Well, now that the US and China are finally ending their game of climate-change chicken, it looks like we will soon be able to do better than Kyoto. And a friendly and ongoing relationship with the nation that, along with us, is responsible for the lion’s share of the world’s current emissions is key to making this happen.

Pity to see all of this flushed down the GOP/Media Complex’s memory hole so they can yammer about the best way to greet foreign heads of state.

[UPDATE: Watch as Jane Hamsher goes toe-to-toe with John McCormack of Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard about the effectiveness of Obama's Asian trip.]

Tags: China, climate change, GOP/Media complex, Hu Jintao, memory hole, Obama
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