The Energy Institute’s vice president for climate and technology, Steve Eule, is in Bonn at the U.N. climate change conference. The conference is being held in preparation for this December’s COP in Cancun, Mexico. Steve first blog post from Bonn is below.

Bonn jour! Welcome to my first posting from Bonn, where over 190 countries are gathered to negotiate a new international climate change agreement.

With one week down and another to go, there’s been a marked contrast in these talks and the April talks also held in Bonn, which we best described as a venting sessions over the frustration felt after the Copenhagen meeting. Everyone agrees that the tone of these talks is much better, but that hasn’t really translated into a whole lot of progress, with many Parties finding it difficult to move beyond previously held positions.

Overall, the story of the first week was something of a tug of war between developed and developing countries—sound familiar? A lot of time was spent during the first week on whether greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets should be determined through a “top-down” or” bottom-up” process.

Even though many developing countries endorsed it, the Copenhagen Accord was seen by many of them as undermining the Kyoto negotiating process where binding and comparable targets for developed countries would be imposed from the top down. And even thought the U.S. isn’t a Party to Kyoto, that hasn’t stopped developing countries from trying to maneuver the U.S. into Kyoto’s orbit through various means.

The U.S., Australia, Canada, Japan, and Russia pushed back in support of a bottom-up approach where developed countries would commit to national actions based on their national circumstances and what is politically possible—the only approach that has a real chance of succeeding. The U.S. also is advocating a more symmetrical approach, whereby the actions of developed and developing countries are subject to similar measurement, reporting, and verification procedures—known more commonly as MRV. (It’s not a proper UN meeting without lots of acronyms!)

So while the temperature of the rhetoric has gone down as the talks have entered into a more specific phase, the Parties aren't any closer to a deal. Let's just say the Parties are being agreeably disagreeable, which after the rancor of the previous year is a step in the right direction.

In future postings, I’ll be exploring these and some other new issues that have cropped up in greater detail. Stay tuned!