That they would get hung up on greenhouse gas emission “verification” seems absurd. You cannot hide a coal-fired powerplant like you can a ballistic missile. You can’t hide the railroad tracks and mountains of coal. The number and power output of such plants are readily identifiable from satellite and other routine surveillance and intelligence.

Accountability is one thing, but the verification issue is in the same class of absurdity as the US Senate.

(China, I think he's talking to you.)

Hmmm. I thought maybe he was talking to the next Republican president who thinks treaties don't matter.

"Or we can choose delay, falling back into the same divisions that have stood in the way of action for years. And we will be back having the same stale arguments month after month, year after year, perhaps decade after decade, all while the danger of climate change grows until it is irreversible." - Barack Obama

Or the United States could go forward with a full-scale effort to develop the technology that would end our own use of fossil fuels, and then sell that technology to the rest of the world.

It didn't take a world-wide treaty to get other countries to move from typewriters to word processors. Other countries didn't have to be strong-armed to connect to the internet.

So when the U.S. -- or some other country -- develops the technology to cheaply capture solar or wind power and the technology to easily store that power, the world will turn away form coal and oil the same way it turned away from horse-drawn carriages.

When Kennedy committed America to send a man to the moon back in 1961, the United States hadn't even sent a man into orbit yet. We need a president with that sort of vision. Tweaking current technology won't solve global warming. And waiting for American private industry to re-develop a long range outlook won't either.

but but President Obama is totally powerless to force these 119 other senators, err countries, to come to an agreement!

Since he absolutely has no leverage over Joe Lieberman, err China, I have no idea why he would spend an hour meeting privately with Wen Jiabao and then tell the *entire* world what he just did.

There's just nothing at all the White House can do to pass this "public option" to solve the health care crisis, err climate change crisis. So I guess we'll just have to wait and see what those other 119 people to agree and we get what we will get.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/dec/18/copenhagen-climate-change-summit-liveblog

Obama didn't exactly light a fire under folks, more like a bed of lukewarm coals, not committing America to bold carbon emission reductions.

I have scanned the web for reactions to the speech and many are not very favorable.

There really is no way Obama could have pleased the world with this speech unless he promised 40%+ reductions by 2020. He didn't, just more of the same. We ain't gonna solve global warming by weatherization. (cash for caulkers, etc.)

I can't say if he did a good job or not, but it does seem like he
wasn't very clear about America taking the lead and rapidly transforming our carbon-fueled economy to a more sustainable one.

Why can't we commit to that? Why not create millions of jobs building solar plants, nuclear, windfarms, and geothermal everything?

Tepid promises just ain't gonna do it.

He used the same construct of a fork between an imperfect but progressive path and a status quo on at least two other big issues: race and the media.

He said in his "more perfect union" speech that we can all ignore the progress achieved and go back to our fault lines, or we can acknowledge the progress achieved and work progressively for a better future.

And of the media he said that they could keep playing the Wright video on a continuous loop or they could pause to think and step back from the shallowness/sensationalism precipice.

This is a guy after my own heart: life is always a choice between staying put (presumably for something perfect) and moving on (with a little now and pushing for a little more).

I think his guiding light for this particular attitude is the civil rights struggle, which just kept on pushing, inch by inch...

When you have a country that can't even sell universal, affordable access to health care to the predominantly "Christian" electorate, when you have a country in which nearly half its citizens is easily tricked into voting against their own best interests time after time, you have a nation unfit to lead the world.

By some credible scientific accounts, we are already past the carbon threshold in the atmosphere for sustaining life as we know it. And while band-aids and incremental steps may work for health care, the climate crisis is no such beast. This isn't about view points, it's about physics. At this rate, anyone under the age of 25 is fucked.

From the predictable weekend headlines handbook:

"Republicans cheer Obama's failure to broker deal with China - to celebrate, Boehner and McConnell go to a Chinese buffet."

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/17/lord-monckton-barred-from-copenhagen-conference-pushed-to-the-ground-by-security/

Today the gloves came off and the true purpose of the �global warming� scare became nakedly visible. Hugo Chavez, the Socialist president of Venezuela, blamed �global warming� on capitalism � and received a standing ovation from very nearly all of the delegates, lamentably including those from those of the capitalist nations of the West that are on the far Left � and that means too many of them.

Previously Robert Mugabe, dictator of Rhodesia, who had refused to leave office when he had been soundly defeated in a recent election, had also won plaudits at the conference for saying that the West ought to pay him plenty of money in reparation of our supposed �climate debt�.

We should cough up at least several trillion dollars to help developing nations. The administration knows that U.S. wealth and credit is infinite, and Mrs. Clinton only wants to spend $100 billion on poor nations.

Interesting that this remark, "The similarity between what the president tells the world about climate change and what the president tells Congress about health care is striking" I read as "The DIS-similarity." Thought you were landing an almost unheard of gut punch, Steve. :) But it does seem a *very long time since we last heard the President so loud and clear on HCR. Maybe it's easier to be frank with people whose votes you don't need, and who won't necessarily immediately misinterpret every word you say.