Here’s what Copenhagen means for the future of food and agriculture.

An astounding amount of action happened in the dead of night last night. Let’s get you up to speed.

Developing nations want the Kyoto Protocol to continue, while developed nations want to invalidate that and consecrate a new treaty. At stake are the mandatory emissions reductions for rich nations and, to a lesser extent, the funding for the developing world to mitigate their financial burden from climate change.

General interest readers in America, apparently, can’t be expected to face the fact that our Congress is not only ruining our own country, it is ruining the globe.

The President will delay his trip to Copenhagen for a week, showing up at the end of the conference rather than the beginning of the conference.

The biggest weakness of the Kyoto protocol for dealing with the human-created emissions that are causing the decades-long rise in global temperature is that the two biggest polluters, the US and China, refused to sign it. China wouldn’t sign it largely because the US under Bush wouldn’t sign it, and the US under Bush wouldn’t sign it because the Bush Administration wasn’t just merely in bed with big industrial polluters, but actively worked for them, being oil execs and all.