COP15: Day 12
Obama’s short speech to the conference plenary was probably the most insulting and patronising speech delivered by a US President in a long time. Unsurprisingly green groups are outraged, but it begs the question – why? The Kyoto Protocol was a monumental failure and didn’t deliver any significant emissions reductions but still rallied activist and political campaigns to dupe the public into thinking its ratification would mean something. Why don’t they just go on that roundabout again? To their credit leaders have managed to whittle down the pre-conference one hundred and eighty-odd pages of negotiating text down to just three, but it has come at the expense of meaning anything.