Lynas: China Rigged Copenhagen For Failure So As To Pin The Blame For It On Obama

This doesn’t surprise me one bit, really:

Copenhagen was a disaster. That much is agreed. But the truth about

what actually happened is in danger of being lost amid the spin and

inevitable mutual recriminations. The truth is this: China wrecked the

talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful

“deal” so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I

know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen.

China’s strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two

weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if

the west had failed the world’s poor once again. And sure enough, the

aid agencies, civil society movements and environmental groups all

took the bait…

…. Even George Monbiot, writing in yesterday’s Guardian, made the mistake of

singly blaming Obama. But I saw Obama fighting desperately to salvage

a deal, and the Chinese delegate saying “no”, over and over again.

Monbiot even approvingly quoted the Sudanese delegate Lumumba

Di-Aping, who denounced the Copenhagen accord as “a suicide pact, an

incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a

few countries”.

Sudan behaves at the talks as a puppet of China; one of a number of

countries that relieves the Chinese delegation of having to fight its

battles in open sessions. It was a perfect stitch-up. China gutted the

deal behind the scenes, and then left its proxies to savage it in

public.

And they did it pretty much because they could — and because even with their glaciers melting, the glaciers that supply their rivers, scoring points off the US is far, far more important than making sure the world as a whole survives.

[Via http://phoenixwoman.wordpress.com]