KEY POINTS:
The minister responsible for climate change negotiations, Tim Groser, says we should not expect the big conference in Copenhagen in December to come up with anything like the Kyoto Protocol.
"The idea that Copenhagen could, in the language used at the Poznan conference, result in a 'full and
certifiable international agreement for the second commitment period' is Noddyland stuff."
That is now generally accepted, he said. "I'm actually quite pleased because if you follow an impossible objective like that the risk is you end up with nothing."
What negotiators are working towards is some kind of framework agreement, which has elements of a deal.
In that context the recent communication from the European Commission is "interesting and positive", Groser said.
"No one is going to agree to another deal like Kyoto where the only obligation on developing countries was to report their emissions."
But the EU document is realistic enough not to think that developing countries could agree to what developed countries did in Kyoto - to emission reduction targets anchored in an historical base, the "year zero" of 1990.
It talks instead of a reduction of 15 to 30 per cent from a "business-as-usual" line representing their projected emissions growth with no policy intervention.
"I think that is very encouraging but it means there is a vast new negotiation that now has to take place."
The EU has also proposed that developed countries need to reduce their emissions by between 25 and 40 per cent by 2020, en route to a reduction of at least 80 per cent by 2050.
Burden-sharing among them should be guided by these parameters: GDP per capita (as a proxy for the ability to pay), the emissions-intensity of their economies, the trend in emissions since 1990 (so that early action to reduce emissions is recognised) and population growth.
To the European list Groser would add another: the potential economies have to mitigate their emissions. That is something farmers argue is limited at this stage in the case of the agricultural emissions which make up half of New Zealand's emissions, and which is also limited in the case of the electricity sector by the fact that two-thirds of its generation is already from renewables.
Groser is attracted to the views expressed in an article published a year ago by Todd Stern, who was recently named as the United States' climate change envoy by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Stern advocated a "layered" approach for US climate change diplomacy: seeking consensus on ambitious commitments and policies with a group of core countries, developing a special bilateral strategy for engaging China and encouraging wider and deeper participation at global level.
Stern was wary of an all-or-nothing treaty-based approach, recognising the systematic difficulty of getting the necessary 67 Senate votes needed to ratify any treaty.
