It seems that an agreement has been reached at the Bali Climate Conference. The United States had originally rejected the compromise, but ultimately accepted. The pact provides for negotiating rounds until 2009. The Conference was scheduled to end yesterday, but was extended a day because no deal had been struck.
It appears that the United States wasn’t in a position to leave without signing. I think that the United States realized what leaving without an agreement would do to their image. If nothing was decided it would be a black-eye for Americans, so they decided to cave in and continue to make “energy intensity” reductions.
Two interesting quotes from Reuters:
"The U.S. has been humbled by the overwhelming message by developing countries that they are ready to be engaged with the problem, and it's been humiliated by the world community. I've never seen such a flip-flop in an environmental treaty context ever," said Bill Hare of Greenpeace."
"At the end of the day, we got an extremely weak agreement," said Sunita Narain, head of the Centre for Science and the Environment in New Delhi. "It's obvious the U.S. is not learning to be alive to world opinion."
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