Relative to starting goals AND to what the planet, nay, the individual national AND global economies, need, Copenhagen was a failure, but ambitions are still alive as the World Press article says. Maybe humanity can yet pass its final exam, but the window of opportunity is closing, and non-binding agreements and the potential for 2+-degree C climate warming scenario will be a barely to unmanageable socio-economic catastrophe.
More troubling though, was global leaderships' complete lack of understanding that the natural deadlines for CO2-equivalent tipping points are independent of human difficulties, that a business-as-usual (BAU) scenario is global societal-suicide (likely irreversible within10-20 years), and that the sustainable development scenario is actually a scenario of the last long wave of economic innovation capable of producing durable economic prosperity and security at higher levels than BAU ever would. It should be jumped on post-haste Benefits for the developing world would exceed many fold in value the climate mitigation related aid the developing world is seeking from the developed world. Further, the developed world's reticence to provide aid is a missed opportunity for global economic stimulation that would produce real wealth and a real needed jump start on the path to the needed economic transformation to sustainability. The word needs to get beyond a solution that simply mitigates one problem (reduces its severity but not its ultimae effect) and shift directions to economic transfomation to sustainability