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January 14, 2010

US Climate Envoy Blames ALBA for Copenhagen Failure, Backs Sidelining UN
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A top US climate negotiator has said he hopes to see the United Nations
sidelined at future talks on global warming. On Wednesday, US Deputy
Envoy for Climate Change Jonathan Pershing said the scale of the climate
talks called for a rethinking of the UN’s role. Pershing cited the
objections of the ALBA bloc, which he said had blocked an agreement in
Copenhagen.

Jonathan Pershing: “Who were they? Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba.
These are countries that are part of the ALBA group, a group that sees
this process not so much as a solution to climate change, but in fact as
a mechanism to redistribute global wealth. And they don’t like the fact
that this did not do that. It didn’t do that, and they objected to that
fact. Well, surprise, surprise, surprise, the rest of the world doesn’t
want to do it that way. But they couldn’t get an agreement, because this
group, this narrow group, was blocking it.”

Pershing says future talks should center around the world’s largest
polluters instead of trying to go through the UN process. He said, “It
is…impossible to imagine a negotiation of enormous complexity where you
have a table of 192 countries involved in all the detail.”



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