WHILE PRESIDENT Obama and other world leaders will proclaim victory in the war against climate change at the end of the Copenhagen meetings, surrender is by far the more likely outcome.
The last best hope is that Obama advances a surprise climate initiative surge that goes beyond short-term politics. It must include an embrace of serious emission targets for the United States and other developed nations, as demanded by the poor nations walking out. But, more broadly, it must reflect a strategy to overcome the time paradox at the heart of a serious politics of climate change in a culture that has abandoned long-term thinking and stewardship.
The short-term focus has spread from corporations laser-focused on the quarterly bottom line to the general populace. While a majority of Americans see climate change as a profound crisis, less than one-third believe that it will impact them personally during their own lives. While they accept the scientific truth of long-term climate catastrophe, they do not see it as a gut issue and do not support the drastic solutions that must be implemented now. Americans focus instead on jobs and other economic crises that are “in their face’’ today. This is the visceral form of mass denial that tends to infect even those who cognitively accept the awful truths of climate science.
Recognizing the time paradox and American voters’ gut-level priorities and denials, Obama proposed short-term solutions to America’ economic crisis that were also building blocks to solve the long-term climate crisis. Last February, he signed a $787 billion green stimulus plan that invested $45 billion in energy efficiency and renewable energy, as well as billions more for light rail, home weatherization, a “smart’’ electricity grid and public transit. Long-term climate solutions that lacked visceral public support hitched a ride on the back of solutions economic issues that were roiling the guts of ordinary voters.
At Copenhagen, though, Obama faces a different political equation, since his domestic policies - and the radical climate obstructionism of Senate Republicans and conservative Democrats - have not persuaded a skeptical world that America is truly serious about the existential climate threat. An Obama climate surge would mean offering at least a 30 percent US reduction in emissions by 2020 from the 1990 level, as part of a commitment to embrace real target emissions as demanded by the Africans and other nations who walked out of the talks earlier this week.
It would also offer a global US climate policy package to developing nations, including China, India and Brazil, that would lead them to embrace more ambitious emission targets and green development. This package for long-term sustainability would win American domestic support by helping solve immediate US and global economic and security crises.
Among such solutions in a climate surge initiative are:
■A green Tobin tax on very short-term speculative financial trades, which was proposed by George Soros at Copenhagen. Such a tax would raise hundreds of billions for investing in energy efficiency and green development projects in poor nations, while restraining the animal spirits already recapturing Wall Street and global financial markets, thus serving US short-term interests in helping prevent a new financial meltdown as it ameliorates long-term climate change.
■Major financing for green development and green technology sharing in developing nations. This would reduce the long-term carbon footprint of large developing nations while also creating a larger market for US exports in both the short and long term.
■New labor and environmental rights built into the text of trade agreements and a shift in the WTO and IMF rules that would encourage government spending on social and environmental infrastructure in both rich and poor nations, thus building human capital for better global jobs, reducing global poverty and expanding US jobs and exports in the short term while restraining long-term climate change.
An Obama climate surge along these lines at Copenhagen, with final details hammered out over the year leading to the 2010 Mexico climate meetings, would be a fitting down payment on the Nobel Peace Prize he just received at Oslo. It has a far better prospect of creating a sustainable and peaceful world than his Afghan surge. If it catalyzed a new serious beginning at Copenhagen, it would align his walk with his eloquent talk of change and ensure his legacy.
Charles Derber, professor of sociology at Boston College, is author of the forthcoming “Greed to Green: Solving Climate Change and Remaking the Economy.’’ 
