by Andrew Bolt
Ben Webster, The Times:
The climate change conference in Cancún has ended with failure to set a target date for the reduction of carbon emissions. The Mexican hosts persuaded 192 out of 193 countries to accept the “Cancún agreement” by the simple trick of aiming for the lowest common denominator — the agreement was secured by deferring decisions on all of the most contentious issues.
Nitin Sethi, The Economic Times of India:
Under the new Cancun deal, each country will be allowed to offer whatever it wishes to pledge for emission reductions on its own volition. There shall be no cumulative target to reach. No one shall ask if the individual targets are collectively adequate or not. The new regime will only check if the pledges have been acted upon or not. Rich countries, including the US, will offer emission reduction targets and others, such as India, will offer their mitigation actions as part of a new deal which can be said to be defined by the bottoms up approach. Under the agreement India will get off easy. Because it let others off easy as well.
Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest:
That is the big news out of Cancun; the green agenda has fallen into a UN black hole and for now at least it cannot get out. The “success” of Cancun is a best case scenario from the skeptic’s point of view. The cost of funding endless UN gabfests in exotic tourist locations (next up: South Africa in 2012) is trivial compared to the cost of any serious efforts to deal with carbon emissions on the scale current scientific theory suggests would be needed. Bureaucrats will dance, journalists will spin and carbon will spew, and the greens will be unable to escape this dysfunctional UN process for years and maybe decades to come.
Ronald Bailey, Reason Online:
The United Nation’s climate change conference here in Cancun came to an end at around 4 a.m. this morning. It would be cynical to call it a bribe, but the Cancun agreements were largely reached because the rich countries continued their vague promises to hand over $100 billion in climate aid annually to poor countries beginning in 2020.
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