OK, the minute I read about the ‘poor nations walking out' at Copenhagen's Climate Change conference...I started banging my forehead on the table. This ‘group of 77' is not just the Pacific Islanders  - it includes Brazil, India and China. They were complaining about the need for more money - but those huge economies are hardly in a position to demand money with the same moral justification as a desperately impoverished African country like Burkina Faso. And it takes someone with a much stronger stomach than I, to tolerate Nigeria (that paragon of financial transparency and generous sharer of oil revenue) when it starts lecturing the European Union on what it wanted to spend.

It was no surprise, therefore, to see that the vast, vast majority of comments on the Wall Street Journal's web site were spitting bile at "this latest example of Third World gangsterism". I can see their point. Some of the loudest complainers have done nothing with First World aid except fill Swiss bank accounts. And their malfeasance and political posturing is in grave danger of antagonizing the North.

Just what we need when the US and UK public are getting more and more cynical about climate change.

But oil-rich Saudi Arabia and Nigeria are not unique in being selfish...hardly. The USA is being totally pathetic in its attitude - at least, Congress is. And just because the administration of some of these countries is chronically infected with corruption does NOT mean that we abandon the poor in those same countries to their fate. But we just have to deliver on measurable, controllable steps to help countries help themselves and the world. I would opine that the REDD initiative - reducing forest destruction - must be the area we focus on. The world needs the forests for a lot of things over and above their role as carbon sinks....medicines and their intense beauty, for a start. And if we can just follow the approach of organizations like the World Land Trust - working with the people who LIVE in the forest to protect it - then we have a chance.

So - a pragmatic, hard-headed attitude combined with a genuine zeal to protect those least amongst us. Come on guys, please make the right decisions!