By This week’s hilarious *and dangerous* Greenwash of the Week webisode takes on The Copenhagen Accord, a political greenwash of epic proportions.
This week’s episode comes on the heels of a leaked document about the Obama administration’s spin strategy around the climate negotiations.
The Guardian reports:
A document accidentally left on a European hotel computer and passed to the Guardian reveals the US government’s increasingly controversial strategy in the global UN climate talks.
Titled Strategic communications objectives and dated 11 March 2010, it outlines the key messages that the Obama administration wants to convey to its critics and to the world media in the run-up to the vital UN climate talks in Cancun, Mexico in November. (You can read the document text below).
Top of the list of objectives is to: “Reinforce the perception that the US is constructively engaged in UN negotiations in an effort to produce a global regime to combat climate change.” It also talks of “managing expectations” of the outcome of the Cancun meeting and bypassing traditional media outlets by using podcasts and “intimate meetings” with the chief US negotiator to disarm the US’s harsher critics.
The Copenhagen Accord was formalized just before UN climate talks resumed in Bonn this past weekend.
Faced with arguably one of the largest problems facing humanity – climate change – the world gathered in Copenhagen last December with the hope of passing a fair, ambitious, and legal binding treaty. Thousands of us were there and millions of people around the world stood up and demanded that our political leaders do the right thing and pass the sort of climate deal science – and the world- desperately needed.
Instead, we got The Copenhagen Accord.
At the final hour the world’s most polluting countries brokered some ugly backroom deals that excluded most of the world – and definitely the most vulnerable and impacted countries.
As the world watched in horror this political cop out, and leaders of small island states began drafting evacuation plans, US President Obama declared it a great achievement. And dirty energy corporations popped the champagne and their shills in Congress called it a “home run.”
As the recent lack of development in Bonn shows, The Copenhagen Accord is really the Greenwash of the Century.
Greenwash of the Week is sponsored by @ChangeChevron, because Energy Shouldn’t Cost Lives.