The UN's de Boer: Alleged "neutral facilitator", former Dutch housing bureaucrat; now allegedly an expert passing judgment on climate change policy

Climate vows insufficient to hold back climate change, expert says | Environment & Development | Deutsche Welle | 08.06.2009

As climate change talks in Bonn enter their final week, negotiators have failed to elicit promises to curb greenhouse gas emissions by as much as the environment requires, a UN official says.

Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said on Monday that the pledges made so far were well below the target for emissions reduction laid down by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The proposals from representatives of more than 30 of the world's richest nations meeting in the former West German capital amount to a reduction in the range of 17 percent to 26 percent of 1990 levels by 2020.

"This is not enough to address climate change," de Boer said.

A whole lot of absurdity packed into one article

So how did a Dutch public housing bureaucrat wind up at the epicentre of the fight to slow global warming?

"I had a policy in my life up to then to try something completely different every three or four years," de Boer said of his decision in 1994 to apply for a job within the Dutch environment ministry to head the climate change department.

"To my great amazement, I got the job. I knew nothing about climate change, absolutely nothing," he said in an interview.
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Today, more than three years after then UN chief Kofi Annan tapped him to head up the United Nation's climate initiative, he has not lost sight of those priorities.
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For some diplomats, however, it is evidence that he has overstepped his role as a neutral facilitator.