Viewed from the West it may have been a fiasco but ...

As the politicos motorcaded through our cosy little capital, and NGOs queued heroically in the snow, these self-appointed custodians of planet Earth must have felt deeply frustrated.

And seen through the eyes of Connie Hedegaard, the former climate supremo, and her bumbling (former) chum the Prime Minister, COP15 was a bitter disappointment.

It’s true Connie bagged a top  EU job out of the deal. And Prime Minister Rasmussen gave up smoking for two weeks. But these are scant recompense for the pain and anguish they must have experienced exiting the conference on that final day, clutching only a flimsy document on soft, absorbent paper: the Copenhagen Accord.

(Recyclable, of course.)

But was COP15 really such a disaster? Well, not for China, it wasn’t. Premier Wen Jiabao characterizes the Copenhagen talks as important and constructive.

And not for India, either. Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh is intensely satisfied at having thwarted attempts to enforce binding targets. Both nations are proud of their intransigence in the face of bully-boy Western leaders trying to impose political power.

The majority of the world’s populations who don’t subscribe to the moral superiority of the West will laud COP15 as a defining moment in history.

COP15 was when we found out that China rules. They talk and think differently, and have some rotten friends. But Chinese leaders are not daft. They’re not the ones who destroyed the world’s financial system with junk mortgages and toxic loans, and they’re not waging futile wars in far-off lands. Were it not for China’s huge investments in the US and Europe, we couldn’t afford to wage our wars in the first place.

So, Connie, Lars, listen up. Thank you. For developing nations COP15 was a triumph.

Developing nations don’t need cash-for-quota hand-outs. They require growth to survive. While we belched self-indulgently through the last century, they lingered humbly, enduring empty stomachs and early death. They may have to resolve some old-fashioned pollution problems domestically before they can address global climate change. But so did we. And so they will. On their own terms.

But when they do get around to it, Chinese leaders will likely accomplish by decree, levels of carbon reduction that our decades of democratic dithering-around could never realize.