Bonn climate talks end with minimal progress

Clearly wishing he was somewhere else

Which is obviously good news. The longer it takes for the UN to reach a pointless “climate deal” the more likely it is that the whole climate edifice will have crumbled to dust. But Yvo de Boer, who’s clearly in Prozac mode at the thought of escaping the UN’s climate bureaucracy is trying to spin it as some kind of progress:

A new round of climate talks has ended with rich and poor countries both sharply criticising a new text meant to pave the way toward a deal to halt global warming.

Still, the United Nations says progress has been made at the two-week meeting in Bonn.

“This, all in all, is a big step forward, making much more possible in Cancun,” UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said on Friday, referring to the next major climate summit in Mexico at the end of the year.

In Bonn, negotiators from 185 countries tried to revive efforts for a global treaty to fight climate change after the disappointing UN summit in Copenhagen in December.

Summing up the talks, the chair of a negotiating group, Margaret Mukahanana-Sangarwe, presented a compromise text on all major issues of a climate treaty which was meant to bridge some of the differences between rich and poor nations and to become the basis for further negotiations.

However, delegates from countries including the United States, China, India, Brazil and Pakistan rejected the text in a floor debate.

Bolivian ambassador Pablo Solon told reporters the document favours developed countries and incorporates too much of the so-called Copenhagen Accord, a political declaration brokered by President Barack Obama in the Danish capital.

“This is not a basis for negotiations,” Solon said. “We are in the middle of a very complicated situation.”

Environmental groups also were not impressed. [When are they ever?]

“This text has moved very little,” Wendel Trio of Greenpeace told reporters.

“On content, we don’t see the progress we need,” said Antje von Broock of Friends of the Earth.

Business as usual, then.

Read it here.