Tensions flared Friday at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen as China’s Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei, using unusually blunt language, described U.S. Chief Negotiator Todd Stern as “irresponsible”, according to an AP report. The Chinese official was responding to comments Stern made at the conference yesterday regarding the possibility of Western aid to the developing world as a form of reparations for the developed world’s historically higher carbon emissions.
In the January-February 2007 issue of The American Interest, Stern, along with co-author William Antholis, proposed the creation of an environmental E-8 to parallel the existing, economics-focused G-8.