Copenhagen: Climate talks end meekly

The historic UN climate talks in Copenhagen ended Saturday after a 31-hour negotiating marathon, narrowly avoiding collapse by accepting a compromise that gives billions to poor nations to deal with global warming but does not require the world's major polluters to make deeper cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions.

Two weeks of wrangling exposed sharp divisions between rich and poor nations – and even among major greenhouse-gas emitters like China and the United States – on how to fight global warming. Yet in the end, nearly all 193 nations at the UN climate conference agreed to a deal brokered by President Barack Obama that points toward deeper emissions cuts for rich nations, but without mandatory limits.

Obama's successful 11th-hour bargaining Friday with China, India, Brazil and South Africa, the world's key developing nations, sets the stage for future cooperation between developed and developing nations.

But the resulting "Copenhagen Accord" was protested by a several nations that demanded deeper emissions cuts by the industrialized world and felt excluded from the major-nation bargaining process.

The accord includes a method for verifying each nation's reductions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, a key demand by Washington, because China has resisted international efforts to monitor its voluntary actions.

Under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, rejected by the US, 37 industrial nations were already modestly cutting back on their emissions of greenhouse gases. Under the new, nonbinding agreement, those richer nations, including the US, are to list their individual emissions targets, and developing countries must list what actions they will take to reduce the growth in their global warming pollution by specific amounts.

"This conference really has been a roller coaster ride in many ways," UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said in the final minutes Saturday. It's "an impressive accord, but not an accord that is legally binding."

The Copenhagen conference also failed to act on one issue many thought was near success here: A plan to protect the world's rain forests, vital to a healthy climate, by paying some 40 poor tropical countries to protect their woodlands.

The overall outcome was a significant disappointment to those who had hoped Obama could put new life into the flagging prospects for some kind of legally binding agreement this year. Instead, it envisions another year of negotiations and leaves myriad details yet to be decided. The next major U.N. climate conference is planned for a year from now in Mexico City.

The Copenhagen Accord, initiated by five of the world's biggest greenhouse-gas polluters, was accepted only after it bogged down in an all-night debate early Saturday, when Bolivia, Cuba, Sudan and Venezuela traded barbs with Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen, who chaired the meeting.