Bad ideas can be beaten back, but they never truly go away, especially if they have deep-pocket backers and an institutional structure as massive as the United Nations. Those who breathed a sigh of relief when the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen failed to produce a treaty in December to replace the Kyoto Protocol should be aware that the battle is still on. A first round of new talks kicked off in Bonn, Germany last weekend (April 9-11) with more than 1700 delegates from 175 countries in attendance. Two more week-long conferences were authorized to take place between the next Bonn meeting at the end of May and the grand finale in Cancun, Mexico (Nov. 29-Dec. 10) to "pick up the pieces" of the Copenhagen conference. Furthermore, the UN Human Rights Council decided at its March meeting in Geneva that the next Social Forum will focus on: "the negative effects of climate change on the full enjoyment of human rights." The UN report for the ...(Read Full Post)