COPENHAGEN: A major bloc of developing nations on Saturday called a draft climate deal in Copenhagen the “worst in history” and hinted it may try to block it.
Lumumba Stanislas Dia-ping of Sudan, chairing the Group of 77 and China bloc of 130 poor nations, accused the United States and host Denmark of trampling on the rights of poor countries.

“Today’s events really represent the worst developments in climate-change negotiations in history,” Dia-ping told reporters.

“The deal locks developing countries and the poor of developing countries into a cycle of poverty forever.”
But it remained to be seen if he would have all developing nations on board because leaders of key nations including China, India, Brazil and South Africa had negotiated personally with US President Barack Obama.

The 194-nation summit met in the early hours Saturday (toward noon Manila time) to review the deal negotiated among major wealthy and developing nations.

Under the rules of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which leads the summit, any agreement has to be approved by consensus.

Dia-ping said Sudan did not agree with the consensus but declined to say clearly whether the delegation would try to block it.

Dia-ping had complained throughout the conference that major countries had threshed out details behind closed doors and not in the full session, which was dominated by speeches from leaders.

“President Obama, acting the way he did, definitely eliminated any differences between him and the Bush presidency,” Dia-ping said.

Bolivia also criticized the process.

“How can 25 or 30 countries cook up a deal that excludes the majority of the world’s more than 190 nations?” said Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Nations.

“We’ve been negotiating for months on one of the most serious crises of our time and now our voices don’t count for anything?” Solon said.

US and European officials countered this, saying it was too unwieldy to hold efficient negotiations among nearly 200 countries, with discussions often hung up on process.

Talks nearly collapsed
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said that talks had been close to collapse on seven occasions, but were ultimately saved by sharp deal-making in which Obama played a lead role.

China had bristled at anything called “verification” of its plan to cut the intensity of its carbon emissions, seeing it as an infringement of sovereignty and saying that rich nations bore primary responsibility for global warming.

Disagreements between the China and United States—the World’s No. 1 and 2 carbon polluters—had been at the core of the divisions holding up a deal.

The emergence of a deal came at the end of Friday in which several draft agreements were knocked back, with leaders themselves taking over the task of redrafting the exact wording of three pages of text.

Different versions of the document showed the leaders particularly split over whether to fix a firm date for finalizing a legally binding treaty in 2010, and a commitment to slashing global carbon emissions in half by 2050.

The agreement was met with dismay by campaigners, who said it was weak, nonbinding and sold out the poor.

“By delaying action, rich countries have condemned millions of the world’s poorest people to hunger, suffering and loss of life as climate change accelerates,” said Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International, calling the outcome “an abject failure.”

“The blame for this disastrous outcome is squarely on the developed nations.”

Antonio Hill of Oxfam charged: “It can’t even be called a deal. It has no deadline for an agreement in 2010 and there is no certainty that it will be a legally binding agreement.”

“The so-called Copenhagen accord is an historic failure, representing the collapse of international efforts to sign a binding global treaty that can stop catastrophic climate change,” said the US group Avaaz.org.
“The accord is far from fair, barely binding, and absolutely unambitious.”

Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo said: “The city of Copenhagen is a climate crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport in shame.

“World leaders had a once in a generation chance to change the world for good, to avert catastrophic climate change. In the end they produced a poor deal full of loopholes big enough to fly Air Force One through.”

Even Europeans  were disappointed

European leaders expressed widespread disappointment Saturday at the deal, lamenting that their ambitions for deep emission cuts had not been matched by others.

While leaders said the agreement between a core group of leaders in Copenhagen was better than nothing, they made little effort to mask their sense of let-down, especially over the failure of developing nations to sign up to binding targets on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“Let’s be honest, this is not a perfect agreement, it will not solve the climate pressures, the climate threat to mankind,” said Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, whose country holds the rotating European Union presidency.

Jose Manuel Barroso, head of the European Union (EU) commission, said the lack of a legally binding agreement was a “matter of concern.”

“This accord is better than no accord, [but] it wasn’t a huge step,” he told reporters.
“The level of ambition is not what we were hoping for.”

The European Union unilaterally agreed in December to cut its emissions by 20 percent by 2020 over 1990 levels, and had promised to raise that figure to 30 percent if others followed suit in Copenhagen.
“We came here to try and put positive energy into this process,” said Reinfeldt.

But hopes that the 30-percent pledge would inspire others proved wide of the mark, with neither China nor the United States—the world’s two biggest polluters—making fresh offers.

Asked at a press conference about China’s position, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown took a swipe at Beijing for “clinging to their version of what an international organization should not do.”
Brown said that this agreement is only the first step toward a legally binding treaty.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she viewed the outcome with mixed emotions, saying “the only alternative to an agreement would have been a failure.”

Merkel, who has offered to host a follow-up meeting in mid-2010, said that the powers of UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) needed to be beefed up, along the lines of the UN’s World Health Organization.

“What we need is a UN environment organization that could control the implementation of the climate process,” she said.

Like his colleagues, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said the deal was the only one that could be reached after the summit had revealed deep rifts.

“The agreement is not perfect but it’s the best one possible,” Sarkozy told reporters.