What’s worse, a bad deal or no deal?
by Rossputin | 2:13 pm, December 18, 2009 | Comments Off
I’m trying to reconcile these two news reports:
From yesterday: “Coming back with an empty agreement would be far worse than coming back empty handed,” said spokesman Robert Gibbs, as President Barack Obama prepared to leave Washington and head to the talks.
From today’s NY Times: President Obama, speaking to world leaders gathered here at the frenzied end of two weeks of climate talks, urged them to come to an agreement — no matter how imperfect — to address global warming and monitor whether countries are in compliance with promised emissions cuts.
Have it both ways much, Obama Administration? (Please, no dirty jokes, please.)
What we have here is Obama/Gibbs/NY Times trying to salvage what little they can from Copenhagen’s certain failure. If they fail to reach any agreement, they can fall back on Gibbs’ statement. If they reach some agreement, it will be even more worthless than Kyoto and everybody will know it; then they can fall back on Obama’s willingness to accect an “imperfect” deal.
At the end of the day, this is a lose-lose situation for Obama who should have taken my advice/prediction and not gone to Copenhagen just to lose even more of his rapidly dwindling political capital both home and abroad.
