Stalemate continues at Copenhagen with angry protests in the streets. India and China formed the axis to oppose US and EU Nations, those who try to bypass Kyoto Protocol and the Bali Action Plan. India would not compromise on its three key principles - no legally binding emission cuts, no peaking year and no international review of domestic-funding mitigation actions.

The outcome of the talks must be within the U.N. Framework on Climate Change abide by the Bali Action Plan and Kyoto Protocol. But on Monday (14/12/2009),UK made it clear that the potential agreement at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference would have to go beyond the Kyoto Protocol and that global emissions would peak by 2020. All major countries would have to summit for monitoring and verification of all actions taken to combat the climate change.

On the same day, environmental ministers from emerging economies like Brazil, South Africa, China and India (BASIC) left the scheduled informal ministerial meetings, protesting that the negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol were being ignored and the Africa group threatened to boycott the present proceedings, which may put the whole agreement into back-burner.

Ignoring the Kyoto Protocol in favour of a proposed new Copenhagen accord means that we are going to accept the death of the only one legally binding instrument that exists now. Many rich countries, however, want to merge the Kyoto Protocol into a new deal with emissions reduction obligations for developing countries, as well as developed countries, including the US. It is too soon even to second-guess the outcome of Copenhagen climate summit.

The re-set goal is to produce an 'operationally binding political agreement' on how and under what terms the actions needed to prevent dangerous global warming will be distributed globally, across 192 countries. Copenhagen agreement is a political agreement which should also match with legal and scientific agreements. The hope is that such an arrangement, which needs to be a major advance on the Kyoto Protocol within the parameters set by the UNFCCC, will eventually lead to a fair, just and workable legal instrument.

Unfortunately, the signs and indications from the first few days of Copenhagen have not been auspicious. This agreement at Copenhagen may be a political agreement and not a legally binding agreement in nature. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone. The science is complex and hard to be understood by common people, but the facts on climate change are very clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years.  At the deal's heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world, covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided.

The majority of developing countries continue to push for a legally binding agreement in which the developed nations would lead with drastic emission reductions (25-40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020) and significant efforts to provide financial assistance(well above the $10 billion a year) , coupled with technology transfer to the developing nations.

But the prospects of such an agreement do not seem bright at all. Developed countries have fear that the developing countries like China and India may grow very fast and overtake developed countries. There are however indications that developed nations, instead of reaching across the trust divide, are contemplating the imposition through political arm-twisting, of a solution that safeguards their key interests while overriding developing country concerns.

Faced with an impasse in the negotiations, the developed nations, in a move initiated by the United States, have been working towards an operationally binding political agreement that has the potential to be converted into a legally binding agreement at an unspecified future date. The major developing economies have done well to anticipate such a biased outcome while adopting a forward-looking attitude themselves.

The draft text agreed to by China, Brazil, India, South Africa and other developing nations, gives them reasonably strong negotiated hand. President Obama especially needs to walk his climate talk with new multilateral vision. Whatever the Copenhagen outcome, India's climate policy must do what a country with the world's second largest population needs to do : reorient itself towards a green path of economic growth, in a much more earnest and internally equitable way than the National Action Plan.