Semantics @ Copenhagen

You say either and I say either, you say neither and I say neither… let's call the whole thing off.’

I can’t think of a more perfect expression than this one from the Louis Armstrong song to describe the climate conference, and the wrangling in working group meetings over every fiftieth verb and pronoun mentioned in the various draft texts that would make the final climate agreement.

Todd Stern, US special envoy for climate change, in a rare display of candidness clarified why an entire portion of the negotiating text had been held up because of his country’s opposition to the word “shall” as opposed to “should” in the context of industrialized country emission reductions. ‘Shall’ it seems is a legally tenable term.

So much for a fail-safe mechanism for ensuring emissions reductions.

But the US did pull out another card from its sleeve. USA Secretary of state Hillary Clinton flew into to Copenhagen on Thursday and announced that the US would allocate some money into the 10 billion dollar EU (European Union) initiated fast track fund over the next three years. It also proposed its willingness to contribute annually to a 100 billion dollar pool until 2020.

Finally some headway on long term finance, but here’s the catch- the money only kicks-in if there is complete transparency from China and other emerging economies (read India) on its proposed actions.
Ms Clinton did not detail how China’s measures would be monitored (that is, if China even allowed it), or the manner in which this money would be raised. The United States’ exact contribution in this proposed financial pie also remains unclear.

Meanwhile, away from the rolling cameras, in a final procedural attempt to ink a deal, two contact groups were created in the afternoon, to try and solve all outstanding issues.

A party member from Australia at one of the closed meetings however, said that progress until Thursday evening was slow, and attempts to defer specific matters to COP16, the next Conference of Parties in Mexico, were increasing.

For instance, the decision to include of carbon capture and sequestration as part emissions trading under the clean development mechanism has been deferred to 2010.

In a late evening conference held by the G77 countries, there was a small sense of relief that negotiations had resumed, cautious reflection of the US financial offer, and a wary acceptance that some of the island states were under pressure to relinquish their demand to limit global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees centigrade.

Meetings are expected to continue through the night, well into Friday morning.

As one of the senior delegates today remarked, the scarcest recourse in the conference right now is sleep.

(The author is a Deputy Special Features Editor at CNN-IBN and is currently on a sabbatical at Oxford University)