Climate Clowns Meet, Schedule More Meetings, Spend More Money

In another colossal waste of money, representatives from 175 countries got together this weekend devising more schemes to get a hold of your money. Nothing was accomplished except plans to have more meetings and spend vast sums of money doing it.

Haven't these jokers every heard of conference calls?

Climate negotiators renewed their skirmishes this weekend at their first conference since the acrimonious summit in Copenhagen, split over how to continue efforts to reach an all-encompassing agreement to control greenhouse gases and help poor countries deal with global warming.

After the letdown of Copenhagen, delegates and officials appeared determine to dampen expectations of a final deal this year, and said negotiations are almost certain to stretch past the next major conference at Cancun, Mexico, in December.

"We should not be striving to get answers to each and every question in Cancun," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. climate secretariat, said Sunday. "The quest to address climate change is a long journey, and achieving perfection takes practice."

The unusual three-day meeting attended by 175 countries was called to plot out a course of negotiation up to the Cancun conference. It was likely to approve two unscheduled meetings at a cost of $7 million to $15 million, depending on where they are held.

But procedural questions quickly spawned divisions on issues touching nerves among rich countries, led by the United States, and developing countries.

At the rate we're going under Obama we won't be a "rich" country much longer, so maybe we'll be off the hook for a few billion.