[caption id="attachment_2550" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="(Image: Icarus by Francis Drake)"][/caption] The 20 or so leaders who met at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in Singapore yesterday are just a fraction of representatives of 170 or so countries that will meet in Copenhagen between the 7-18th December at the UN Climate Change Conference. But they included the leaders of the two biggest polluting countries in the world, the US and China, and therefore felt in a position to declare that the long-awaited legally binding deal at Copenhagen will not happen. So long as global issues are decided by negotiations between nation states, only in the rarest of circumstances is an agreement not in the short-term interests of the most powerful nations going to come about, let alone a legally binding constraint such as that required to reduce emissions. Climate change is an issue that brings out the structural shortcomings of the current global system of national negotiation particularly acutely, because burning carbon is so important in the world’s largest economies, and the effects of climate change seem so distant from the immediate interests of the most powerful in those countries. Persuading those who benefit most from burning fossil fuels of the overwhelming evidence of potentially catastrophic side effects at some point in the future in some part of the planet is not straightforward: there is a complete mismatch between the sphere of national deliberation and the global nature of the problem. The European Union, if not all its member states, has seen the potential and necessity of the climate change issue in ushering in a new era of global decisions based thoroughly on reasoning that cross-cuts national boundaries. The European Union is the leading if highly imperfect example of a transnational decision making body in which short-term national interests are increasingly placed aside in favour of the greater common good. With its Communication Towards a Comprehensive Agreement on Climate Change, the European Commission tried to play a leading role in the lead up to Copenhagen, which would not only have led to a legally binding agreement but also to a paradigm shift in international relations, based on respect for the law, not on economic or military might. As too often the EU has lacked the political agility and coherence to outplay the other actors, and it is clear it also lacks the respect of other global leaders. The last minute invitation of the Danish prime minister - the chair of the Copenhagen Climate Conference - to fly overnight for a breakfast meeting in Singapore to try to salvage some justification for pressing ahead with the negotiations, seems indicative of a kind of disregard for the process. In the face of such hubris perhaps the protest of citizens and NGOs against the stealing of the Copenhagen agreements from the world might start to provide the conditions for profoundly remodelling the mechanics of global politics to match our legitimate expectations for saving our planet. The world doesn't need another Icarus, nor a Prometheus. And let us hope there are not so many ashes that we start hoping for a phoenix.