Copenhagen Insider: China 'Wrecked' Talks

Everyone more or less agrees by now that the climate-change talks at Copenhagen were a failure. While it has been fashionable to blame Barack Obama, a British man who was inside the negotiations lays the blame squarely at the feet of China. “China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful ‘deal’ so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame,” Mark Lynas writes for the Guardian. It was China, not the U.S. or any other western country, that insisted an 80-percent emissions-reduction target for rich countries by 2050 be taken out of the deal. "Why can't we even mention our own targets?" Angela Merkel apparently fumed. Lynas says that the move was probably because China predicted—correctly—that Obama would be blamed. Lynas writes, “ I saw Obama fighting desperately to salvage a deal, and the Chinese delegate saying ‘no,’ over and over again.”