Deadlocked

Right now, at this very moment, I am sitting in the middle of stalled negotiations at the UN climate conference in Bali.

It’s noon on Saturday. The negotiations were supposed to have wrapped up yesterday. I should have been relaxing on the beach by now. Instead, I’m holed up inside a conference room watching countries bicker over the fine print of a draft agreement.

The talks have been extended indefinitely. No one knows for sure when they will end. It could be over in a couple of hours. It could be over tomorrow. Or talks could break down completely and we’ll leave Bali without an agreement altogether.

You can thank Canada and the U.S. for the stalemate. They worked hard to water down the agreement and countries will now have to vote on whether or not they will accept a weaker deal (I’ve written about the negotiations on my Bali Blog so I won’t repeat myself here).

Things have been going from bad to worse. The talks keep starting and stopping. Twice this morning, the negotiations started only to be suspended moments later. Right now, absolutely nothing is happening.

The glacial pace of these UN negotiations is unbearably frustrating.

Anyway, I just wanted to vent since there’s not much else I can do right now.