Opinions Rampant on Significance of Climate Summit

Numerous newspapers, in editorials, op-eds and columns, addressed the Copenhagen climate summit today. The New York Times, in an editorial, wrote: "While the commitments on the table before the conference--most recently from the United States, China and the subcontinent--are almost certainly inadequate, they have made possible a Copenhagen agreement that will at least put the world on the right path."

The Wall Street Journal differed: "For months, the U.N. climate change summit that began yesterday in Copenhagen has been billed as the world's last best hope to match the scientific consensus on global warming with a policy consensus. But now it turns out there is little of either, and Copenhagen looks like it will go down as one of the more remarkable cases of political hubris in recent memory."

Washington Post columnist Stephen Stromberg wrote: "If there's something scandalous in Copenhagen, it's that the commitments on the table from developed countries and large developing nations are probably inadequate to prevent the sort of warming scientists estimate is unacceptably risky. That's not something that negotiators can solve over the next two weeks--even getting a preliminary figure from the Obama administration was hard enough, given the legislative mess in Congress. But it is the bottom-line that climate negotiators, no doubt, wish wasn't there at the moment."

And in a Times op-ed, Nikita Lopoukhine, chairman of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas, said whatever may happen in Copenhagen, the preservation and expansion of climate sinks was necessary: "Multibillion-dollar technological approaches to storing carbon, from pumping it into depleted oil wells to building massive carbon absorption systems, are grabbing people’s imagination. At the same time — and inexplicably--a more convenient and less expensive method is being overlooked." The method she preferred was preserving forests and creating new ones. Forests, she wrote, "can hold 20 to 100 times more carbon dioxide than agricultural systems could on the same amount of land."

- Related stories also appeared in Wall Street Journal (op-ed), Washington Post (editorial), Wall Street Journal (op-ed).