INTERNATIONAL negotiations next year to agree carbon emission cuts cannot be held “to ransom by a handful of countries”, British prime minister Gordon Brown said last night.
Clearly blaming the collapse of the Copenhagen talks on China, Mr Brown said reform of global bodies such as the United Nations would need to be examined “to meet the common challenges we face”.
Mr Brown did not identify China by name in his Christmas podcast, published on the Downing Street website last night, but, earlier, his climate change secretary Ed Miliband clearly did.
Speaking earlier, Mr Brown, who gave a videolink message to a London environmental conference, said the deal reached in Copenhagen was “at best flawed, at worst chaotic”, agreed by “a flawed decision-making process”.
In his Christmas message, Mr Brown said that the Copenhagen negotiations had not been easy, Mr Brown said he feared near the end that they would “collapse and we would have no deal at all”.
However, he took some positive messages from the Danish gathering, saying that the world eventually had come “together in the first step towards a new alliance to overcome the enormous challenges of climate change”.
“Through strength of common purpose, we were able finally to break the deadlock and in a breakthrough never seen on this scale before, secure agreement from the international community. But this cannot be the end. In fact, it is only the beginning and we must go further still,” said the prime minister.
Earlier, Mr Miliband acknowledged that Copenhagen had failed to produce an agreement to cut global carbon emissions by 50 per cent by 2050 or by 80 per cent amongst the world’s most developed countries.
“Both were vetoed by China, despite the support of a coalition of developed and the vast majority of developing countries. Indeed, this is one of the straws in the wind for the future: the old order of developed versus developing has been replaced by more interesting alliances,” said the climate change secretary.
However, the partial progress achieved in Copenhagen was significant. “Would it have been better to refuse to sign and walk away? No. Of course it was right to consider whether we should sign,” said Mr Miliband.
Besides China, Mr Miliband also laid some of the blame at the door of Sudan, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba, sources close to the minister made clear last night.
