Matt Yglesias on the Olympics, the environment, and Copenhagen:
Barack Obama will fly to Copenhagen at the end of this week for a brief visit. His mission: to plead Chicago’s case to the International Olympic Committee, which is deciding whether the Windy City, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, or Tokyo will get the honor (and questionable economic benefits) of hosting the 2016 Games. The minor scheduling decision has set off a small tempest in a teapot. The attention-starved Danes (they’re even paying for me to visit next week to learn about their domestic environmental policy) are excited to play host to a U.S. president. And the American right wing is eager to offer absurd political attacks, like Michael Goldfarb from The Weekly Standard making the claim that lobbying on behalf of his hometown — and the United States of America — is some kind of corrupt payoff to an insidious “Chicago machine.”
This is silly, but the brief moment of international political attention to the city of Copenhagen prefigures a much more serious meeting in December — a major international conference on climate change. It’s long been clear that the summit was unlikely to immediately result in global adoption of a comprehensive agreement on curbing greenhouse gas emissions — the issue of exactly how to handle the large economies of the developing world is too thorny.
