simon zadek

Hours to go before we can tick off the millennium’s first decade. A proliferation of learned and witty articles reflecting backwards and predicting forwards grace the pages of every media portal. Much has happened in this opening decade, in fact so much that it is hard to know where to start or how to judge what history will find important. Al Queda has become a household name, but will it’s dark record and call to arms even be remembered in another decade.

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Tomorrow’s history is rarely created by extraordinary moments, it is merely punctuated by them.

Copenhagen will be seen as a failure of vision, leadership, and compassion. The Copenhagen Accord, ‘noted’ in extra time at COP15, will be stuck with the Sudanese’s naming as a “suicide pact”. And President’s Obama, Hu and many others, however they speak to their domestic constituencies, will have been party to this failed attempt to strike an ambitious deal.

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My piece, ‘Revising Plan A’, published a couple of weeks ago first on OpenDemocracy.net and then on ChinaDialogue.net, has generated some heated responses, covered now on various forums including ChinaDaily.com. With 48 hours to go before the end of the Copenhagen talks, i thought it relevant to offer a couple of reflections based on my original argument and the current situation.

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Well, the ‘walk out’ (not formally a walk out because the G77 spokeperson said “we have not walked out, we are firming up our position on the KP, the KP is our exodus point”) an hour or so ago by G77 negotiators provides a dazzling display of ‘negotiators’ itch’, akin to the itchy trigger finger of someone holding a loaded gun who is feeling frustrated and let down.

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Mr Tony Blair led a high-level session yesterday on forests, which as we all now know provides up to fifth of global opportunities to 2020 for carbon mitigation. Blair is the unquestioned master of messaging, so i sat humbly seeking to read the tea leaves in his eloquent words. That said, there is an Obama-like complexity in his dialectics so that it can be a little tough to derive a straight line from the word to the meaning.

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Fighting through the hot air being vented in Copenhagen to understand the real numbers is an obligation, not just a ‘nice to do’. Project Catalyst, an international policy platform that I have been working with for over 18 months, has produced what I think is simply the best piece that crystallises the data in a document entitled ‘Taking Stock: the Emissions Levels Implied by the Current Proposals for Copenhagen’.

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