European Voice: Climate Deal - Result to be fought for in Copenhagen -

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This may be remembered as the moment when Barack Obama said: “No, we can't.” With just 22 days to go before the climate-change summit in Copenhagen, the US president, at a meeting of Asia-Pacific leaders, signaled that it would be unrealistic to expect a legally binding treaty to emerge from the talks. Copenhagen would be a “staging-post” on the way to a global deal, not the place to nail down the details, he said. But this cold shower from Singapore does not mean that Copenhagen is a lost cause, or that the European Union has nothing to fight for. <

Scientists and green campaigners are right, though, to be worried. Lurking in the background is the chilling precedent of the Doha round of world trade talks. After failure at Cancún in 2003, negotiators are still going round and round. The stakes on climate change are far higher: the climate will not wait for negotiators to fine-tune the legal niceties, or for the US Senate to pass a cap-and-trade bill.

Note EU-Digest: Europe can "force"" these talks in the good direction by coupling the level of results of the Copenhagen climate change talks to favorable or unfavorable bi-lateral trade agreements with the EU.