The holiday season is upon us and those who attended the Copenhagen climate summit last week aren’t getting what they want from the man in red. ‘Hopenhagen’ has been unwrapped and what most activists got was a whole lot of disappointment. And maybe a few hours of jail time.

So much hope was placed in the two-week United Nations summit. The Bella Centre (where all talks were held) was supposed to be where everything changed. Carbon emissions were to be cut up to 80% by 2050. And the countries were to be legally bound to the contracts.

Unfortunately, the summit ended up being mostly debate, with little results. Many of the poorer countries were shut out of the critical discussions, leaving main players like the United States, China, Brazil and India to construct the decisions.

Er, well, the few decisions that were actually made. The agreement creates a system for monitoring and reporting each nation’s pollution-reduction efforts. It also sets the goal of only a 2 degrees Celsius increase in global temperatures by the year 2050 (based on pre-industrial temperatures). Oh, and remember, none of this is legally binding. The world must wait for another climate summit (and another and, probably, another) for something like that to happen.

In response to this waste of time, Klimaforum, a counter-conference, was being held a few miles from the UN climate summit. Keynote speakers included activists such as Naomi Klein and Vandana Shiva. A number of Latin American leaders were in attendance.

Demonstrators were outside the Bella Centre speaking out for many different organizations, including indigenous Latin Americans and various climate justice groups. The shouts seemed to fall on deaf ears. Over one thousand were arrested during the summit, but many were quickly released. Danish police are currently being investigated on human rights violations.

So while all of us are shopping for our ‘green’ holiday gifts – an energy-saving flat-screen television here, a solar cell phone charger there – remember that last week the United States and many other nations had their chance to save the world.

Obviously, it’s up to us.

More info:
Forbes
NY Times
The Guardian
Anphoblat