Climate meet did not move us the way we needed to: Obama

With ‘Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on his way to the airport’ and the ‘Chinese skipping negotiations’, US President Barack Obama today said the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit was on the brink of a complete collapse, before he decided to take a chance to give it a final push.

“Rather than see a complete collapse in Copenhagen, in which nothing at all got done and would have been a huge backward step, at least we kind of held ground and there wasn’t too much backsliding from where we were,” Obama said.

“It didn’t move us the way we need to. The science says that we have got to significantly reduce emissions over the next 40 years.

There’s nothing in the Copenhagen agreement that ensures that that happens,” Obama said when asked about the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change.

“What did occur was that at a point where there was about to be complete breakdown, and the Prime Minister of India was heading to the airport and the Chinese representatives were essentially skipping negotiations, and everybody’s screaming, what did happen was, cooler heads prevailed,” he told US PBS television’s Newshour programme.

“We were able to at least agree on non-legally binding targets for all countries — not just the US, not just Europe, but also for China and India, which, projecting forward, are going to be the world’s largest emitters.”