By Duncan MacKenzie

So much, and yet so little, has happened since the end of last week at Copenhagen. The rifts between developed and developing countries are still festering. 100,000 people marched in Copenhagen alone on Saturday to demand a deal, but many inside the conference centre remarked how little attention or concern was paid to them. Analysis by Climate Interactive suggests that current pledges by developed countries would put the world on a path towards 770 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – almost double current levels and an increase on today’s levels over six times larger than what the EU is proposing. Such a level would lead to catastrophic climatic changes – much more frequent and severe droughts, famines, floods and storms and significant sea-level rises – according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others including the British Met Office’s Hadley Centre. At the same time, research by Friends of the Earth suggests that loopholes in the Kyoto Protocol, such as ‘hot air’ or unused emissions rights, maritime and aviation emissions, forestry and offsets, some of which are counted twice, could render the current emissions targets of developed countries useless from the atmosphere’s point of view, and could effectively more than halve a target of 40%, the minimum advocated by most environmental organisations for 2020.

As this political impasse is provoking high levels of protest and tension, as the ministers and heads of government arrive in Copenhagen, so the UN bureaucracy is progressively excluding civil society from the conference. Organisations had been told that yesterday and today, only a small proportion of their registered participants would be permitted to enter, which has already caused protest. Today, however, Friends of the Earth International and other organisations including Avaaz have been completely blocked. Negotiations this morning between the Chair of Friends of the Earth International, Nnimmo Bassey, and Yvo de Boer, the Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, were fruitless. In any event, the UNFCCC’s Secretariat plans only to admit much-reduced numbers of NGO delegates tomorrow and just 90 on Friday, the final day of the conference, leaving themselves vulnerable to accusations of exclusivity and opaqueness just when key states like the US say that Copenhagen will deliver a ‘transparent’ and ‘credible’ outcome.

None of this must distract attention from the political dealings. The lack of trust between developed and developing countries was highlighted yesterday when the Swedish Environment Minister said that developing countries could be ‘turned’ to the will of the developed world if just five key people were influenced by Saudi oil money, and again when African delegates and key developed countries caused negotiations on the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol to be suspended because neither side would agree to talk about the other’s pet subjects. Needless to say, Japan, the US and Sweden were refusing to discuss binding Kyoto targets since their aim is to create a watered-down Copenhagen protocol including the USA and the key developing countries of China, India and Brazil.

Of course, developed countries will attempt to label whatever outcome is stitched together at the last minute as a ‘success’. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Let us not judge the book by its cover.