WASHINGTON — Six years ago, President Obama came away from a round of global climate talks bitter and frustrated, having been reduced to personally chasing other world leaders around a Copenhagen conference center and bursting uninvited into a meeting with them to salvage a pact that left many disappointed.
On Saturday, Mr. Obama strode triumphantly into the Cabinet Room of the White House to declare victory in his quest for an ambitious climate agreement, after 195 nations reached an accord in a Paris suburb that commits them to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
“We met the moment,” Mr. Obama said. “Together, we’ve shown what’s possible when the world stands as one.”
For Mr. Obama, the agreement represents a legacy-shaping success, destined to join his health care law in the annals of his most lasting achievements.
The deal, reached after two weeks of intensive negotiating by world leaders and top diplomats, is a vindication of Mr. Obama’s decision to make tackling climate change a centerpiece of his second term. As the economy improved and Mr. Obama was able to focus on other priorities, he invested substantial time, energy and political capital on forging a pact that he has described as a moral imperative.
It also reflects difficult lessons Mr. Obama learned about diplomacy and global leadership along the way. In Copenhagen, he was a first-term president meeting “the stark reality of just how complicated and fractured this issue was on the global stage,” a senior administration official said on Saturday.
Mr. Obama’s experience there “underscored that if we were going to make real progress on this, we were going to have to be patient and develop a strategy” both at home and globally.
The president, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the issue candidly, “deliberately and ambitiously pushed the envelope on climate.” And on Saturday, Mr. Obama said the Paris agreement had been possible in large part because he had done so. This year, he issued regulations to slash carbon pollution from power plants, and last year he forged an emissions reduction agreement with President Xi Jinping of China that encouraged other nations to set their own climate goals.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/us/president-obama-once-a-guest-now-a-leader-in-world-talks.html?ref=world&_r=0
