Hillary Clinton’s heavyweight trade mission to India includes a sideshow in the shape of Todd Stern, US special envoy on climate change.
Yesterday he met the new Indian environment minister, Jayanthi Natarajan, to discuss the looming UN conference in Durban. It’s hard to imagine they found any common ground.
The US is interested only in progressing the contents of the Cancun agreements – the green climate fund, clean technology and so on. India wants to hear what the Americans are doing about global warming. We all know the short answer to that.
If Stern hoped that the new minister would be a soft touch, it sounds as though he was disappointed. There are snippets in the Indian media reporting that the scheduled day-long get together was cut by the home team to three hours.
Stern flew his seven-strong delegation halfway around the world for that.
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this post was first published by OneWorld UK