WHY ARE SOME TOPICS SIMPLY OFF-LIMITS TO DISCUSSION ALTHOUGH THEY ARE GERMANE TO THE ISSUES?
IF THEY WERE TALKED ABOUT RIGHT NOW THEY WOULD BLOW NEGOTIATIONS UP. Professional negotiators do know their art. They know that if contentious matters are thrashed about publicly TOO EARLY, egos will be forced to storm out. Each player first must invest his pound of flesh in the process painlessly, so that he has more to lose by folding than by staying. The players have not yet reached the comfort zone. The mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol were last minute inclusions. Not every working group does meet outside of these larger conferences. So, “voluntary commitments” and “reviews of adequacies of commitments” will languish in the unlit recesses until a less threatening time. Germany displayed bad behavior in prematurely putting caps on the table. That one no-no made for a sour squabble that most Parties wanted to avoid. China says, “No contentious issue is to be in COP5” in October-November this year. Q: CAN’T SOMEONE MAKE “ADDITIONALITY” AND “SUPPLEMENTARITY” SEEM LIKE REAL WORDS? A: TR
