In Cancun, Mexico, there was a green roar of indignation...

Agence France-Presse — Getty Images President Evo Morales of Bolivia addressing a crowd at the climate conference on Thursday.

As the United Nations conference on climate change in Cancún, Mexico, entered its last official day on Friday, one thing was clear: whatever the final outcome, real progress on reining in the emissions responsible for global warming would have to wait for another time.

But even as some diplomats expressed cautious optimism that modest action on small-bore issues like deforestation and emissions verification could be wrung from the negotiations, a bellow of indignation came from the developing world, in the form of remarks at the proceedings by Evo Morales, president of Bolivia.

In a news conference on Thursday, Mr. Morales warned that the failure to drastically curb emissions soon would cause millions of preventable deaths. “If, from here, we send the Kyoto Protocol to the rubbish bin we are responsible for ecocide and genocide because we’ll be sending many people to their deaths,” he said.


“We came to Cancún to save nature, forests, planet Earth,” Mr. Morales added. “We are not here to convert nature into a commodity. We have not come here to revitalize capitalism with carbon markets.”
Bolivia is part of a small coalition of Latin American countries, including Paraguay, Cuba and Nicaragua, that has vocally opposed a plan under negotiation at the conference that would create a carbon-trading market to pay developing nations to conserve their forests.
“We don’t want to transform our forests into a trading token, because basically they are worth much more than what they’re being valued for. Monetary terms are just incapable of engulfing all those values,” Miguel Lovera, the chief negotiator for Paraguay, told Democracy Now recently in an interview

Last week, Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, made his own incendiary remarks on climate change, appearing to blame recent devastating floods in the country on a “criminal development model” by countries like the United States.

Last year in Copenhagen, a handful of nations led by Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba and Sudan refused to ratify the conference’s climate accord over objections to the treatment of developing nations in the deal
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In remarks on Friday, however, Claudia Salerno, chief climate negotiator for Venezuela, struck a conciliatory tone that seemed to suggest the country would be more cooperative this year. “Willingness of countries at this time to reach agreement is huge,” Ms. Salerno said..


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