"The city of Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport," said John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, on Friday night. "There are no targets for carbon cuts and no agreement on a legally binding treaty."
The guilty men included U.S. President Barack Obama and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva, who took the first planes out. Xie Zhenhua, the head of China's delegation, lingered behind to declare that "the meeting has had a positive result, everyone should be happy." But many people are unhappy, including most of the 130 presidents and prime ministers who showed up for the Copenhagen conference.
Their countries spent two weeks struggling unsuccessfully to bridge the gulf between the rich and the poor nations over who pays to fix the eminently fixable problem of global warming, but at least they were clear on the goal. They wanted a treaty that would hold the warming to a safe level (although they could not agree on what that level was). Most of them even wanted to make it legally enforceable.