There is a blockbuster piece at Salon.com that looks at Five common mistakes in the coverage of the Copenhagen Accord. It punctures some of the fallacies that have abounded in some quarters such as that there could have been a better Accord voted on by the delegates, that the smaller developing nations rejected the Accord, that it was a product of big-nation backroom wheeling and dealing with no input from key constituencies such as the Small Island Nations and the Least Developed Countries, that it’s a failure and that Obama is to blame. I’ve touched on the last two items here at the blog, but this article gives you point-by-point analysis of what actually happened with excellent hyperlinks to key press conferences and other useful reference points.
(One corrective to the Salon piece, and it’s a common mistake: The Byrd-Hagel resolution passed in the summer of 1997, five months before the Kyoto Protocol was adopted by the Conference of the Parties. It anticipated the Kyoto Protocol, certainly, but it was not a reaction.)
The “Financial Times” has its usual comprehensive coverage, with a ton of commentary. Reuters also has a lot to say, including a FACTBOX-Main points of the Copenhagen Accord. There’s plenty more out there, from the environmental groups to business groups and others. (For all the documentation and other background material, you can go to the UNFCCC.)
I’ll be parsing some of this over the course of the next few weeks. Meanwhile, I highly recommend the Salon article.