With the exception of a few hours of shut-eye, I stayed up all Friday night to watch the last hours of the COP15 negotiations. It was absolutely gripping, shocking, heart-wrenching, inspiring and in the end came with some measure of relief. (BTW – for anyone that would like to watch any part of Friday night’s negotiations it is all online here. I have found this partial transcript useful for skipping around in the many hours of footage.)
I have not seen a single news article that has done justice to what happened overnight. In fact, I’ve seen many that I feel misunderstand or mischaracterize what happened. Watching the questions journalists asked during the final press conferences, I kept saying to my computer screen “Were you not watching!?” so I suppose it should come as little surprise that I, as someone who watched the entire thing, feel a number of the articles written thus far leave readers with misimpressions.
In particular, I would like to address five things that I’ve seen reported or opined in various media (primarily on the left) over the last two days that I believe are fallacies, based on what I witnessed.
Fallacy #1 – The “Copenhagen Accord” text preempted a better agreement from being adopted at COP15.
Continue reading ’5 Fallacies In the Coverage of the Copenhagen Accord’
