The Copenhagen climate change summit has been an extraordinary intergovernmental conference. Its first week largely played out as consciousness-raising global theatre, with dramatic displays of brinkmanship both within and outside the conference.
Even the most hardened and cynical international diplomats would have realised that Copenhagen's agenda and style transcend the usual stereotyped North-South political and economic divisions, and the accompanying developing country post-colonial resentments of the North's wealth and power and condescension.
From the young people who descended en masse on the conference came a different, global stewardship message: that this conference is above all about the present leadership generation's shared responsibility to protect, as best it can, the climate security of coming generations everywhere.
This new message of international solidarity got through: I cannot recall any conference where NGO activism is playing such a major constructive role. Unlike in world trade conferences, the young activists in Copenhagen know that this conference has to be encouraged to make progress; derailment is not a desirable outcome.
The conference shrugged off the peripheral challenge of the climate sceptics' counter-conference. 'Climategate', a deliberate criminal hacking into ten years of climate scientists' emails in a desperate last-ditch effort by carbon lobbies to cast doubt on climate science, was quickly sidelined.
An effort to break the traditional North-South mould, mounted by low-lying small island states, foundered. Everyone understood that the final deals, if achievable, would be struck between the US representing the North, and China representing the South. If Tuvalu goes under, so will the heavily populated deltas of mainland Asia.
With broad agreement on a two degrees maximum safe global average temperature increase, the coinage in the main game was threefold: What were fair emissions targets for the North and the South? How much money would be pledged by the North for mitigation and adaptation in the South? And what compliance mechanisms?
China played its strong hand deftly and tactfully. Before the conference, it had pledged to reduce its emissions intensity to 2020 by 40 per cent. The massive scale of China's expanding renewable energy, nuclear energy, and cleaner coal-burning infrastructure lent credibility to this pledge. As a command economy, China was trusted to deliver on its stated targets.
The US played from a weaker base. The sincerity of the Obama administration's commitment to the negotiation was unquestioned: but his huge problem of securing Congressional approval was equally understood. Obama had to