copenhagenclimatechangeconference

Published: 12/19/09

UN Chief: 'We Have a Deal' on Climate Change

By not in system - AOL News

COPENHAGEN (Dec. 19) -- The U.N. climate conference narrowly escaped collapse Saturday as bitterly divided delegates agreed after all-night talks to recognize a political compromise that President Barack Obama brokered with China and other emerging powers. The Copenhagen Accord was bogged down for hours by protests from delegates who felt they were excluded from the process or said the deal didn't go far enough in cutting the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. After a break, the conference president gaveled a decision to "take note" of the agreement instead of formally ...

Published: 12/18/09

Compromise Climate Deal Reached in Copenhagen

By Christopher Weber - Politics Daily

President Obama announced late Friday that an "unprecedented breakthrough" had been achieved toward a global agreement to fight climate change. The deal is not legally binding and was still being drafted, the president said toward the end of the global warming summit attended by representatives of nearly 200 nations in Copenhagen. Obama said while "meaningful" progress had been made, it will take still more work to forge an accord that is bound by law, the Associated Press reported. "We have come a long way, but we have much further to go," the president said before leaving Copenhagen for ...

Published: 12/18/09

'Unprecedented' Climate Deal Is Disappointing

By Joseph Schuman - AOL News

(Dec. 18) -- President Barack Obama late Friday heralded what he called an "unprecedented breakthrough" on curbing greenhouse gases at the Copenhagen summit on climate change, but the deal was more of a nonbinding consensus than the kind of concrete accord he described as urgent only hours earlier. The final details described by Obama were still being hammered out after midnight in the Danish capital, and after Air Force One had already left for Washington in hopes of arriving home ahead of a major snowstorm. Before leaving, the president said he wasn't sure if the agreement even required a ...

Published: 12/17/09

Why Jane Goodall Learned to Love Carbon Markets

By not in system - AOL News

(Dec. 17) -- Jane Goodall remembers the days when she could fly over the Tanzanian rain forests that sheltered her beloved chimpanzees and look out across a vast carpet of thick, mossy green stretching as far as she could see. By the early 1990s, however, the carpet had grown threadbare outside the tiny Gombe Stream National Park as farmers and loggers moved deeper and deeper into the once-eternal tangle of vines and bush, chopping down swathes of virgin forests for timber and burning what remained to make way for farmland. "That's when I realized there is no way you can address conservation ...

Published: 12/17/09

Greenpeace Stages Dramatic Protest at U.S. Chamber of Commerce

By David Sessions - Politics Daily

Greenpeace sent four green-and-white squad cars labeled "Climate Crime Unit" to the Washington headquarters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Thursday morning, disrupting a field trip for local schoolchildren and provoking a response by D.C. police. Several demonstrators were arrested, but not before they had scaled the Chamber building on H Street, draping it in yellow "crime scene" tape and barking through bullhorns as if participating in a hostage negotiation. "We're asking the Chamber of Commerce to release our climate policy," said Molly Dorozenski, a Greenpeace official. "This is the ...

Published: 12/16/09

Police Use Pepper Spray on Protesters in Copenhagen

By not in system - AOL News

COPENHAGEN (Dec. 16) - Danish police fired pepper spray and beat protesters with batons outside the U.N. climate conference on Wednesday, as disputes inside left major issues unresolved just two days before world leaders hope to sign a historic agreement to fight global warming. With the talks so clearly deadlocked, Connie Hedegaard, former Danish climate minister, resigned from the conference presidency to allow her boss, Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen to preside as world leaders from 115 nations streamed into Copenhagen. She was to continue overseeing the closed-door ...

Published: 12/11/09

A Perfect Storm: When Politics and Weather Collide

By Steve Pendlebury - AOL News

(Dec. 11) -- It's as predictable as the lines of people stocking up on milk, bread and toilet paper when there's snow in the forecast. Whenever we run a weather story, an argument about global warming breaks out in the comments section of the article. It happened again this week as a snowstorm plowed across much of the U.S. while a U.N. climate change conference was going on in Copenhagen. Here's a sample of readers' comments about the wintry weather: Tr00f Detect0r3: So much for Al Gore's global warming hoax! RRC55: Never fails. Every time there's a weather story like this, some idiot has ...

Published: 12/11/09

Opinion: World Talks, US Delivers on Global Warming

By John Merline - AOL News

(Dec. 11) -- At the Copenhagen global warming conference this week, Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson sought to reassure world leaders that the United States is "fighting to make up for lost time" on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Her plea is understandable. The U.S. constantly gets an earful on this issue from other world big shots. "We need stronger U.S. action on climate change," is how Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg put it earlier this year. John Ashton, the British special representative for climate change, complained about an "ambition gap" between the U.S. and ...

Published: 12/10/09

Sarah Palin's Value-Added Spin on Climate Change: 'Boycott Copenhagen'

By Walter Shapiro - Politics Daily

Not since Emile Zola electrified France in 1898 by publishing his open letter on the Dreyfus Affair that began, "J'accuse" has there been an op-ed to equal Sarah Palin's Washington Post screed against the U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen. Okay, this is a slight exaggeration. But nothing that Lloyd Bentsen, Jack Kemp or (yikes!) John Edwards ever wrote in the years after their failed vice presidential campaigns sparked this kind of controversy. The Washington Post was attacked for publishing the piece, sneered at for not fact-checking Palin's assertions, and ridiculed for failing ...

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