Senator Jim Inhofe is the leading Republican on the United States Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. He’s a climate change denier. Still  he’s not wrong about everything. His assessment of what happened in Copenhagen is that there are no mandatory reductions of emissions of gases for either developed or developing nations; no verification of claimed reductions and the deadline has been shifted from 2010. “It’s a nothing agreement” was his summary.  If it were an agreement then the parties would be committed to doing something, no matter how feeble, instead what has been delivered after a fortnight is a political declaration which is of as much real use a a Trotskyist group declaring that it’s all in favour of workers’ militias and the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie by next Tuesday. What has happened is that the world’s rulers have decided to ignore the science and allow the planet to carry on warming.

One of Sudan’s representatives, Lumumba Stanislas Dia-ping, hit the nail on the head when he said that Africa was being asked “to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries". From a Sudanese point of view his vision of the prolonged mass deaths through climate change is already a reality and yesterday’s was a guarantee that it will get worse.

The real leadership for sustained meaningful action came from Latin America. The Bolivians face a future in which their major cities lose their water as the glaciers melt. They had called for the creation of an International Environmental Court with the power to impose penalties on states which do not meet their obligations. The big flaw in that idea is that international courts and treaties are not really meant to punish the rich and powerful, otherwise Tony Blair would be serving a whole life term somewhere. Hugo Chavez articulated superbly the anti-democratic imperial nature of the rotten deal that Obama stitched up.

Obama’s role in the whole process was execrable. He spent virtually all of the final day trying to make the Chinese the villains of the piece on the pretext that they would not allow their emissions to be externally monitored. The fairly obvious point to make is that a vast chunk of what China produces is shipped to the rich world and if these emissions were to be entered into anyone’s ledger it should be into the rich world’s column. It was the sort of China bashing that George W would have watched approvingly and diverted the discussion onto a second or third order issue. If we wanted to add something else to the charge sheet against Obama we could point to his complete lack of spirit when it came to facing down domestic reactionaries like Inhofe, a man who at least has the courage of his deranged convictions. It seems like a long time ago but do you remember how when he was looking for votes Obama mobilised legions of volunteer cannon fodder? What was as issue in Copenhagen was infinitely more important than an election and Obama yielded to the likes of Inhofe every step of the way instead of mobilising his supporters to win the political argument.

I predicted after the December 5th Climate Change demonstration in London that we would see this quickly emerge as a real mass movement. One of the few positives to emerge from Copenhagen has been the complete collapse of the world’s rulers’ attempt to impose their solution. Their chimera of carbon offsetting, carbon trading, carbon capture while the rich produce and consume in the same old way are unsustainable.  Obama stitched up a deal with South Africa, India, Brazil and the US momentarily forgetting his special relationship with Britain and explicitly rejecting the demands of poorer countries to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees and not allowing them to take part in the discussion. It is not hyperbole to say that Copenhagen’s outcome is a death sentence for tens of millions of people in the coming years, overwhelmingly among the planet’s poor. Resistance to it has to take the form  of mass activity, winning the arguments in the trade unions, insisting that radical political organisations make it a centrepiece of their activity and listening to the leadership coming from the global south.