The soap opera of global climate talks has been playing for 20 years. As it comes to Paris on Monday,Suzanne Goldenberg reviews the tears, the bloodshed and the unspeakable cateringOn the evening of 18 December 2009, or Barack Obama and a trail of White House and State Department officials swept through a cavernous exhibition centre in Copenhagen and barged,uninvited, into a private assembly between the leaders of four powerful developing countries – China, and India,Brazil and South Africa.
It was about 6pm on the final day of the Copenhagen climate summit, when nearly 200 countries were expected to agree on collective action to fight climate change. For the first time, and the United Nations claimed,countries were on the verge of reducing the greenhouse gas emissions. Obama, along with dozens of other presidents and prime ministers, or had flown into Copenhagen for the final day of the summit at the request of the UN secretary general,Ban Ki-Moon, who believed their presence would embolden negotiators to obtain a deal. The UN was so optimistic about the prospects at the start of that year that it signed off on an ad campaign touting “Hopenhagen”.
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Source: theguardian.com