Our guest blogger is Andrew Light, a specialist in international climate policy and a Senior Fellow with Center for American Progress.

Shortly before leaving Copenhagen yesterday, President Obama announced that he had succeeded in finalizing the text of an interim political agreement, the Copenhagen Accord, with the cooperation of a surprising array of parties from the developing world, including leaders from Brazil, South Africa, India, and China. This is a first step toward finishing a new internationally ratifiable agreement on climate change.

United Nations Executive Secretary Ban Ki-moon and other parties have committed themselves to taking the next step and turning this document into a binding legal agreement by the next UN climate summit in Mexico City in 2010.

The Danish government outlined the proposal for a two-step process last month; today’s developments mark significant success toward achieving this goal, though further work needs to be done. Accepting this two-step process effectively allowed the United States to put interim targets on the table for emissions reductions for the first time, put money on the table for quick start financing for two years, and more importantly reassert America’s leadership on this issue. As the conference closed today, many parties pledged their commitment to the Copenhagen Accord and promised further emissions reductions. More will follow next year. This proposal will be taken up for full endorsement when initial negotiations start for the Mexico City meeting in 2010. I commend the US negotiators and Secretary Clinton for a job well done under extremely difficult circumstances.

Despite the work that now needs to be done, this interim agreement takes a bold move towards fundamentally changing how the world looks at ending carbon pollution. The United States’ union with the four aforementioned countries is premised on a new guiding assumption for climate negotiations: that the world is divided between the major emitters of carbon pollution and everyone else; not simply developed and developing countries. Though there will be differences among the expectations of emissions reductions among this group, all will be expected to carry their fair share of this challenge in the Copenhagen Accord — putting to rest fears in the United States that decreasing carbon pollution would be at the expense of economic competitiveness.

President Obama was clear that the science of global warming will guide the ambitions of the Copenhagen Accord as it moves toward its next step. This is good news. For the first time, an international agreement on climate change includes provisions to consider holding temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius, lower than the present standard of 2 degrees Celsius.

Now the US Congress must meet this challenge and finish the job it began last summer of achieving energy independence, creating millions of clean energy jobs, and carving out the basis for international leadership on climate change.

Our guest blogger is Andrew Light, a Senior Fellow at American Progress specializing in climate, energy, and science policy.

If you believe recent media reports, the two international climate change meetings held last week in L’Aquila, Italy, at best failed to do anything and at worst signal that no serious progress will be made on a global climate agreement this year. If true, this is bad news. According to the byzantine rules of the Kyoto Protocol, set to expire in 2012, a successor to that treaty must be decided this December at the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen.

The good news is that many of the assessments of these meetings are incomplete, if not inaccurate. A New York Times editorial last week described the recognition by the world’s major carbon emitters that temperatures should not increase more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels as an “aspirational” goal. They concluded:

But with global climate talks in Copenhagen only five months away, aspirational goals won’t carry things very far.

However, the Times based its argument in language from a draft of a declaration — not from the document itself. This weakened, “aspirational” language was struck in the final version of the document, rendering this claim obsolete.

All in all, the twin declarations emerging from the G-8 and the Major Economies Forum (MEF) indicate that progress has been made on the road to Copenhagen. So why the rush to publish such dour reports from Italy, whether accurate or not? It’s simple: Invested parties had unrealistic expectations of meetings, which have no binding impact on the upcoming U.N. summit.

There were, of course, disappointments. Developed countries in the G-8 failed to agree on the medium-term goal of reducing reductions targets by 2020. Developing nations, especially China and India, refused to embrace the long-term goal of halving global emissions by 2050, a cap most of the world’s leading scientists believe is essential to avoiding the worst impacts of climate change.

But if we only focus on what did not happen, we miss seeing the achievements made in a very short amount of time. When the United States rejoined the global discussion on a new climate treaty in January, it triggered an 11-month countdown to solve the most complicated problem humanity has ever faced. For the 16 countries responsible for 80 percent of carbon emissions to recognize even one marker of failure — a rise in temperature over 2 degrees Celcius — is fantastically impressive. A week before the Italy meetings, negotiators doubted that this language would make the final cut.

Some will argue that it’s easy to agree on an abstract target like limiting planetary warming. But the G-8 struck an appropriate balance in creating objectives that are both ambitious and achievable. Industrialized countries finally determined their fair share of long-term emissions cuts: 80 percent by 2050. Plus, U.S. President Barack Obama prudently hedged on setting a 2020 emissions target. The Markey-Waxman climate change bill, which includes emissions cuts, is working its way through Congress. While it does, the president should not signal that he will preempt or undercut the legislature.

What about China and India’s apparent intransigence to halving emissions by 2050? The fact is that the United States cannot criticize their behavior. If a Chinese leader had promised to join the world eight years ago in reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and then reversed course — as former President George W. Bush did in 2001 — the United States would hardly agree to his demands now. So it is with China and India. It will take incentives, diplomacy, and, most of all, time to bring about world-saving targets from them.

Ultimately, the most promising parts of last week’s agreements received only marginal coverage. The MEF announced that developed countries will double clean-energy funding for developing nations — putting pressure on those countries to commit to emissions reductions in exchange, as agreed upon at the Bali summit in 2007. Additionally, the participating countries agreed to determine how they will finance their plans by the G-20 meeting in September.

The countries assembled last week didn’t get everything settled on the first go around. But in light of their accomplishments, we should hold off on our rush to proclaim failure.