International negotiations are like a game of political pass the parcel and every government is desperate to ensure they're not holding up negotiations when the music stops.
Last July India was left holding theparcel of negotiating text for the World Trade Organisation's Doha talks when the music stopped, and was internationally condemned for the failed negotiations.
At this week's UN Climate Change Summit in New York, the grand rhetoric from political leaders shows they are seeking to make sure the music keeps playing when they are in the spotlight.
Kevin Rudd is proposing a "grand bargain", Chinese President Hu Jintao has proposed per capita emissions cuts and Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh is celebrating proposed domestic legislation for emissions targets. Their statements aren't about securing agreement but laying the foundations of blame for when the December Copenhagen meeting collapses in attempting to replace the failed Kyoto Protocol.
The New York meeting exposes how wide the fracture lines are.
Earlier this year the US House of Representatives passed a bill for an emissions trading scheme. But the bill's passage through the Senate was predicated on an agreement in Copenhagen that will see developing countries reduce their emissions.
Under the negotiating principle of common but differentiated responsibilities a cut to emissions doesn't have to be equivalent to that of the US, but it certainly needs to be more than curbing emissions growth until 2020, as China proposes.
At the summit, Hu restated China's position that climate change "is an environmental issue but also, and more importantly, a development issue". The only development was a commitment to "cut carbon dioxide emission per unit of GDP". But China's chief climate change negotiator, Yu Qingtai, has consistently argued "the difference in per capita emissions between China and the developed nations is still huge" and China's commitment to combat climate change is tempered by pride that "more and more ... countrymen can afford a car and go to work in a car".
Similarly the Indian government has previously argued that they are committed to "per capita emissions of greenhouse gases not exceeding those of the developed countries".
The UN's chief climate change bureaucrat, Yvo de Boer, may be hailing these statements as a significant achievement, but without developing country commitments to emissions cuts, American officials cannot negotiate a politically palatable agreement for approval by the US Senate.
Politically China and India have been smart in passing the parcel to US President Barack Obama while he's stymied because his Congress is thrashing out healthcare reform.
And developing countries are not alone in playing climate politics.
In a speech delivered at New York University's School of Law, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong flagged negotiating text for "national schedules" that would require countries to report their emissions targets and efforts to achieve them.
According to Wong, one of the benefits is to "deliver the environmental certainty of knowing that there is consensus on a vision for our global future". Considering this is the objective of establishing the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that oversees negotiations, it is hardly a step forward. Instead Wong's proposal is designed to keep the music playing a little longer.
At the G8 summit in Italy earlier this year, leaders agreed to a long-term goal of reducing global emissions by 50per cent by 2050, and 80 per cent by developed countries.
Japan's announced aspiration to reduce emissions by 25 per cent by 2020 is consistent. But like the hot air being expelled at the New York summit, G8 leaders' statements are non-binding and are primarily used for political positioning.
Next week climate change negotiations resume in Bangkok to iron out details for a Copenhagen agreement.
Present negotiating texts include radically different and mutually exclusive visions for emissions targets and how to secure them through instruments, including international financing and undermining intellectual property on low-carbon technology.
Expect another round of media savvy statements to ensure no attending minister looks like they are holding back a deal. But the music will stop by the end of the December Copenhagen meeting and if ministers are smart, they won't be passing the parcel, they will be dropping it.
And while Rudd and Wong seek to pass their emissions trading scheme they will be committing Australia to unilateral action to harm our economy while the rest of the world points fingers for Copenhagen's failure.
So even if Australia isn't left with the parcel in Copenhagen, Rudd and Wong will come home to start a new game: ETS hot potato.
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