Did China derail Copenhagen?

I would also question Miliband's assessment although not having first hand experience of what actually happened my opinion is little more than a guess based on a few threads of news that came through and a few things I know about China.  In my opinion China with its population control measures which I know are repulsive to the Western way of thinking and their willingness to state a carbon reduction target per unit of GDP, again not mirroring our way of doing things but none the less showing that they take the issue seriously and are prepared to take responsibility for it, China really can't be seen as the biggest problem.

I think these were the main problems

1.  allowing carbon reduction issue to get entangled with the poverty relief issues.  I think that any future meetings should refuse to have the question of funding transfer to under-developed nations as part of the agenda at all.  All participants who decide to participate should come with a proposal of what they are prepared to do to reduce carbon emission in their country within the context of their social and economic circumstances as they are at the time.  The issue of funding should be left to other international forums such as the G8 or G20 or (G whatever number it becomes) who already undertake this role and who conceivably could decide in light of their own carbon reduction pledges to attach greening conditions to their money in the future.

2.  as far as I can gather there was a lot of organisational hiccups in that some countries were not sent the document to be discussed (really inexcusable if they were invited) and also seeing as the USA indicated that it wanted to come on board but could only make a final offer after congress had passed their reduction target it would have been better to postpone until after this had been achieved which in effect is what has happened anyhow.

3.  rather than to aim to get every single country into some agreement I agree with Obama's approach of getting the bigger and potentially bigger economies in agreement and signed up ahead of the rest  - not actively excluding the smaller countries but letting them know in no uncertain terms that they will not be allowed to derail the work of the larger emitters - this is real leadership.  I was really surprised that by banding together many of these pretty irrelvant countries believed they could somehow force their issues and for countries like Seychelles to play the victim when in fact they have been living quite a good life off the very high carbon emitting industry of tourism for so many years is just hypocritical.

4.  the question of the carbon credits schemes needs to be sorted out as well.  To my mind they are too easy to manipulate much like sub prime mortgages and I believe they should be scraped in favour of direct action on each and every location.  This ties into the whole question of how we measure transparency and my feeling is that it should be kept as simple as possible.