Bidding to revive a stalled pact to halt global warming, Germany and Mexico are about to host a three-day informal conference where officials from 45 nations will mull ways out of the impasse, according to dpa. A heavily hyped summit last December in the Danish capital of Copenhagen ended with practically no significant agreement on how to reduce emissions of gases, mainly carbon dioxide, that are making the planet warm up. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Mexico's President Felipe Calderon are to give the two keynote addresses late Sunday afternoon to start the event. Merkel's environment minister, Norbert Roettgen, will oversee the rest of the meeting, which lasts through Tuesday. Mexico is scheduled to hold the next full-scale UN climate summit at the resort of Cancun in November and December. The Bonn meeting is not an official United Nations one. Germany is calling it the Petersberg Climate Dialogue because the venue is a hilltop government guesthouse, the former Petersberg Hotel, which is often used for secluded meetings among world officials. Formal resolutions are not planned, but the Germans and Mexicans are hoping it will come up with ideas to clear the logjam on climate policies. Roettgen said the purpose of the meeting was "confidence building" among the industrial, emerging and developing nations. "We have to get trust and flexibility back into the climate process," he said. World officials have realized that climate talks are going to be very, very hard. Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, said as much when he told a German newspaper, the Hamburger Abendblatt, he was not expecting anything legally binding to be settled at Cancun, but maybe some "real progress" in deciding who makes the sacrifices. The two most important figures at the Bonn talks are likely to be the chief US and Chinese negotiators on climate policy. The Copenhagen meeting was essentially a locking of horns between those two nations. Current world climate rules are set out in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. There is no replacement agreement lined up.
