http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0614/1224272437597.html

IT WAS never going to be easy for the representatives of 184 countries meeting in Bonn last week to deal with the debris left scattered after the inconclusive result of last December’s UN climate change summit in Copenhagen.

The drafting of its rather non-committal “accord” by the chosen few and its presentation at the eleventh hour on a take-it-or-leave-it basis generated enormous mistrust, especially among developing countries, and even threatened to undermine the United Nations itself as the appropriate forum for negotiating measures aimed at mitigating the impacts of global warming.
Against that unpromising backdrop, the Bonn talks were surprisingly constructive. As outgoing UN climate chief Yvo de Boer noted, countries were “talking to each other rather than at each other” with a view to laying the groundwork for this year’s climate summit in Cancún, Mexico.
Although nothing concrete was agreed, delegates will meet in Bonn again in August and there will be a further week-long round of talks, probably in October – six weeks before they are due to reconvene for the 16th annual Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or Cop 16.
One of the lessons learned from the Copenhagen fiasco is that a more inclusive approach must be adopted – something that “did not happen” at Cop 15, certainly not during the last few chaotic days of high-level negotiations in the Danish capital.
The truth is that the UN is the only international organisation where every country sits at the table as an equal. The UNFCCC has its drawbacks, in that all decisions must be adopted by consensus, but it is the only valid way to proceed. That said, it is quite deplorable that Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries, including leftist Venezuela, used this consensus rule last week to block a perfectly reasonable request by vulnerable small island states for an update on the latest scientific evidence for global warming.
Given that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is not due to complete its fifth assessment until 2014 and that doubts have been cast on some elements of its fourth assessment, published in 2007, any solid peer-reviewed scientific workhould be put in the public domain to guide the negotiations.
One of the most pressing matters is to “operationalise” (in UNFCCC jargon) the $30 billion (€24.7 billion) pledged in “fast-start” aid to help developing countries cope with climate change, from now to 2012. This is a mere token of what is to come; by 2020, according to promises made in Copenhagen, it should rise to $100 billion (€82.5 billion) a year.
In these difficult times, one might well ask where such sums will be found. But there is one very obvious source. Coincidentally, the OECD last week called for the phasing out of fossil fuel subsidies worth €459 billion a year, of which at least €82.5 billion goes to oil companies and other producers.
If this could be switched to where it’s needed most, the world would take a quantum leap in the right direction.