AFP: Rich-poor impasse complicates UN climate talks: US negotiator

AFP: Rich-poor impasse complicates UN climate talks: US negotiator: "Rich-poor impasse complicates UN climate talks: US negotiator

(AFP) – Sep 10, 2009

WASHINGTON — Persistent disagreement between developed and less developed countries in UN climate talks have made an international solution difficult to achieve, the top US negotiator said Thursday.

'Let me say bluntly, that the tenor of negotiations in the formal UN track has been difficult,' Todd Stern, Special Envoy for Climate Change, told the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming.

'And yet we must find a way to bridge this developed/developing country divide which is still the heart of the struggle for an international solution,' Stern said three months ahead of the Copenhagen conference.

The December 7-18 talks in Copenhagen, under the 192-nation UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), aim to craft a post-2012 pact for curbing the heat-trapping gases that drive perilous global warming.

Developing countries often tend not to see the problem as of their making but feel they are being asked to take part in a solution that could undercut their efforts to improve their people's quality of life.

Highly industrialized countries, however, see climate change as a deeply serious issue with irreversible consequences for the planet, and as an issu"