Jakarta welcomes Copenhagen deal

Indonesia yesterday welcomed the outcome of climate change talks in Copenhagen, a day after a deal reached to fight global warming came in for heavy criticism.
“Indonesia is pleased, as [we have] taken a wholehearted stance to save our Earth, to save the children in our country,” President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was quoted as saying in a statement on his website.
With the deal, “there is a direction for negotiations in the middle of 2010 in Germany,” Yudhoyono said, without elaborating.
The Copenhagen Accord, passed Saturday after two weeks of frantic negotiations, was strongly condemned as a backdoor deal that violated UN democracy, excluded the poor and doomed the world to disastrous climate change.
It set a commitment to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), but did not spell out the important stepping stones – global emissions targets for 2020 or 2050 – for getting there.
Indonesia is the world’s third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide blamed for global warming, after China and the United States, if the effects of deforestation are taken into account.
While Indonesia has no obligations under the current Kyoto Protocol, Yudhoyono in September committed his nation to a 26-percent cut in emissions by 2020 compared with a “business-as-usual” approach of doing nothing.