Deal or no deal?

There's a media strategy which says if you raise hopes too high you may end up disappointing people, but if you lower expectations you may be able to snatch success from the jaws of failure if things turn out better than you have led people to expect.

The messages put out before the Copenhagen summit - that a deal might be reached but it was expected to take more time to make it legally binding - reminded me of the latter. Several of Obama's big US policy shifts - including health reform - have gone right to the edge of possible failure before the decision-makers votes were counted and the reforms came in.

So - as the Copenhagen conference comes to an end - the prospect of a fragile accord on the longterm goal of stopping climate change, with no agreement on targets for 2020, feels like a let-down. In the world of politics, it will be easy for people to emphasise the negative uncertainties left lying on the table as the world leaders and negotiators pack their bags to go home.

I'm a natural optimist, but following the G20 I wrote about why it was going to be much more difficult to get agreement at Copenhagen. I would love to have been proved wrong. And yet, comparing where we are now to Kyoto, real progress has been made. At Copenhagen we have three things that weren't there at Kyoto: a scientific consensus on the need for action that withstood the climate change deniers best efforts to undermine the reasons for action; a US President at the conference calling for agreement and pledging an 80 per cent cut in his country's emissions by 2050; and perhaps most importantly, poorer countries with the confidence to bite the hands that partly feed them by demanding a further shift in their direction to achieve a fairer global deal, and prepared to walk from the negotiating table when it wasn't forthcoming.

The threat of climate change is the opportunity to utilise the growing necessity of climate justice to end global poverty. Creating a stable and prosperous world economy will not be easy - it will take much more than tinkering with the financial systems we make until they start up again. But the international dialogue in the past two weeks put the real issues out on the table, and it isn't really surprising the deal is still some way off.