The White House announced Friday evening that President Barack Obama is delaying his planned arrival in Copenhagen for the global climate conference, visiting closer to Christmas instead of next week when the meeting starts as he originally planned.

White House officials said the delay was meant to take advantage of momentum from recent positive signals from China and India, among the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases.

Both nations have for the first time set targets to reduce their carbon "intensity," the ratio of carbon emissions to their gross domestic product.

An excerpt from a White House statement:

Based on his conversations with other leaders and the progress that has already been made to give momentum to negotiations, the President believes that continued U.S. leadership can be most productive through his participation at the end of the Copenhagen conference on December 18th rather than on December 9th. There are still outstanding issues that must be negotiated for an agreement to be reached, but this decision reflects the President's commitment to doing all that he can to pursue a positive outcome. The United States will have representation in Copenhagen throughout the negotiating process by State Department negotiators and Cabinet officials who will highlight the great strides we have made this year towards a clean energy economy.

 

Other world leaders will be at the conference towards the end of the meeting so Obama's later arrival will place him in Copenhagen when the real power players will be there.

There was some thought that the president might want to avoid the end of the talks so that if they failed to achieve any breakthroughs, he could avoid being associated with the failure.

An excerpt from an AP story:

One climate expert at MIT says by going to Copenhagen later in the summit, Obama is putting "a little more skin in the game."