What's remarkable, and in retrospect poignant, is that Nasheed appears to have harbored genuine hope that the Copenhagen climate summit would produce a real breakthrough. Truth is, a lot of us felt that way, and not just for sentimental reasons. The election of Barack Obama as president of the United States the year before had removed one colossal obstacle: the George W. Bush administration, which had been actively hostile to mandatory emissions reductions during its eight years in power. By contrast, Obama had singled out "a planet in peril" during his victory speech on Election Night 2008 as one of the three major crises he would confront in the White House. A few weeks later, his inclusion of billions of dollars for energy efficiency and renewable energy in his economic stimulus package indicated he intended to follow through on that pledge. What's more, it appeared that the US and China, the world's two climate change superpowers, might at last be transcending their stand-off over who should cut emissions first and by how much. As I reported in Vanity Fair a month before Copenhagen, Obama had sanctioned months of back-channel negotiations with top Chinese officials that now had culminated in an agreement that both nations would reduce emissions.
Of course, it didn't work out that way in Copenhagen. Obama arrived at the end of the summit and, clearly suffering from jet lag, gave one of the worst speeches of his career. His tone was flat and bordered on lecturing, while his content was almost insulting to an international audience. For while Obama declared that the US would promise to cut emissions by 17 percent by 2020, international observers recognized that this number was based on blatantly moving the goalposts. For decades, the international community had measured emissions reductions from a baseline of 1990. By that standard, the US was really offering a mere 4 percent reduction; only by substituting a baseline of 2005 could the Obama administration arrive at its 17 percent figure. It was like promising to kick a 50 yard field goal from the 20 yard line.
None of this is mentioned in The Island President, which instead lays the blame for Copenhagen's shortcomings mainly on China. Not without reason, it must be said. China dragged its feet throughout the summit, resisting calls to accept even long-term limits to its emissions and pressuring poor nations to toe its diplomatic line or risk the loss of development aid. Ed Milliband, the climate secretary of Great Britain, later wrote in The Guardian that China had sabotaged the summit. In a late night meeting in the summit's final hours attended by the heads of government or state from the world's biggest polluters, Milliband wrote, China had refused to accept what Obama and European leaders saw as a grand compromise: the rich industrial nations would cut emissions by 80 percent by 2050 while the world as a whole—including China and other emerging economies—would cut emissions by 50 percent by 2050. The problem was, this formula would have imposed larger per capita emissions cuts on China, India and other developing nations than it imposed on the rich industrial nations whose past emissions had caused global warming in the first place. This, China would never accept.
The Island President does not show this pivotal meeting, presumably because Nasheed—the filmmakers' ticket inside—was not invited to attend it. But Nasheed did support the proposal. Indeed, so desperate was he for some kind of deal that he also endorsed the much weaker alternative the big powers subsequently settled on. This, the briefly ballyhooed Copenhagen Accord, was a far cry from what science said was needed to save civilization, much less to save The Maldives. Contrary to early news reports, the accord did not pledge to limit temperature rise to 2 C over pre-industrial levels; it merely "recognize[d] the scientific view" that the increase should be kept to 2 C. Nor did the accord do much to bring this result about. It neither enumerated nor prescribed binding limits on emissions; it only committed both developed and developing nations to "take action" to "achiev[e] the peaking of global and national emissions as soon as possible…." Adding insult to injury, the big powers presented the accord to the rest of the governments in Copenhagen in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion. No surprise, then, that the full summit explicitly declined to approve the Copenhagen Accord, voting instead merely to "take note" of it.
Nevertheless, near the end of The Island President we see Nasheed smiling as he telephones his mother while being driven to the airport to return home. In the translation at the bottom of the screen, he tells her with evident pleasure that the meeting has yielded an agreement. Fair enough. He was exhausted, and most boys, even grown ones, like to impress their mothers with their accomplishments. But neither science nor politics has been kind to Nasheed's upbeat assessment in the years since.
The world's greenhouse gas emissions rose to record levels in 2010, despite the overhang of widespread economic stagnation. Ice sheets continued melting. Record floods left 14 million people homeless in Pakistan and record heat in Russia led the government to halt grain exports, spooking global markets and giving rise to price spikes that helped provoke food riots in a dozen countries. The year 2011 brought even more extreme weather, with Texas suffering the worst one-year drought in its history and the hottest summer in the entire nation's history, even as Governor Rick Perry, like all Republican presidential candidates, continued to insist there was no such thing as man-made global warming.
And in an ominous foreshadowing of the Maldives' potential fate, in March 2012 the government of Kiribati announced it was planning to evacuate its inhabitants before rising seas completely inundated the island nation. Like the Maldives, Kiribati is a string of low-lying tropical islands, but located in the Pacific Ocean, about 1,000 miles south of Hawaii. Anote Tong, the president of Kirabati, told the (London) Telegraph he was attempting to buy 5,000 acres of land on Fiji where his countrymen could resettle, adding that the international community should provide financial aid to deal with "the needs of countries like Kiribati."
Meanwhile, the two international climate negotiations that followed the Copenhagen summit—in 2010 in Cancun, Mexico, and in 2011 in Durban, South Africa—made little more progress than Copenhagen had, and for the same basic reason: neither the US nor China was willing to reduce its emissions anytime soon. Astonishingly, the agreement reached in Durban—no country would be obliged to cut emissions until 2020—will, if left unchanged, guarantee the world will fail to limit temperature rise to 2 C, the level even the Copenhagen Accord acknowledged would cause "dangerous" climate change.
And so, for the sake of humanity and especially the two billion people around the world under the age of 30 who will spend their lives coping with climate change, the Durban agreement must not stand. It must be superseded by an agreement that respects science and the planet that makes our civilization possible. As I wrote in The Nation at the time,
