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by MONITOR

ONE thing that Nicolas Sarkozy cannot be accused of is predictability.
Yesterday he chose a Paris conference on deforestation to air his familiar views on the reform of the United Nations and his proposals for reinvigorating the Climate Change agenda. His analysis of the reasons for the failure of the Climate Change Conference at Copenhagen last December was new. He said that the scientists responsible for the Conference documentation had “earned the right to our gratitude” but complained that the event itself had been “badly managed” -- more than one hundred heads of state arriving for the final sessions had been handed a draft agreement that was no better than “volapuk” -- a word that interpreters said was something like “gobbledegook”. President Sarkozy's main point was to draw lessons from the all-night rescue talks between a dozen or so leading nations that produced the compromise Copenhagen Accord which kept the Climate Change process alive at the very last moment after almost two weeks of negotiation had almost killed it off.

He argued that trying to get unanimity on an issue as complex as Climate Change among 192 members of the UN was unrealistic and proposed instead that at the Mexico meeting later this year the running should be made with an agreement among a much smaller group of those nations with a lead role in taking measures to hold back the advance of Climate Change.