Climate and Energy Minister Connie Hedegaard spoke Monday in Bangkok to delegates from 190 countries at the opening of a new meeting under UN auspices. The 2500 guests are assembled into the penultimate round of talks before the summit in Copenhagen in December, and Connie Hedegaard decided at the last minute to travel to Thailand’s capital to keep the negotiators up to the mark.
“My concern is that the political momentum, which after all we have seen the past week at meetings in New York, will not be communicated to the negotiators, so they just continue where they left off in Bonn in August. It is crucial that there will be pressure for it is tempting to revert to the usual disagreements,” Connie Hedegaard said in Bangkok.
In her speech, she praised China, India and Japan to have moved considerably on the climate front, but the Minister was not impressed with the U.S.:
“There is no specific new reporting from the U.S.. We all know why, and what problems they have, but there is after all very much going in the right direction. The whole world has for many years sighed after China and India should sign up on the pitch, and it’s actually happened in the last 8-10 days, the minister said.
