What the Montreal meetings managed to do was to keep alive a fully engaged discussion around post-2012 that engaged all parties, and I think that was its very important accomplishment. Now, the parties, particularly the United States, didn't agree that those kinds of discussions would actually represent a set of negotiations that would explicitly address what parties should do after 2012, but at least it kept the issue on the table. The last such informal dialogue is going to be taking place in Vienna at the end of August, and thereafter there has to be a decision made in Bali for actually launching a process for negotiations that would eventually...and the hope is that by 2009, when Denmark hosts it, there would actually be a regime put in place that would set out exactly what a party's reduction commitment should be.
I think the initiative in the United States now of 15 countries coming together, and the 15 major emitters, should not be seen necessarily as a negative thing. I think that in the summit declaration itself there is an explicit recognition that that summit that the U.S. will be holding will be directly fed into the Bali discussions.
The Bali discussions themselves will simply be like what happened at the Berlin Mandate in 1995. The Berlin Mandate set the terms for what the negotiations for commitments would be by parties, starting in 2008. This Bali declaration would again start that process.
So in other words, I don't see anything of a hugely substantive nature being reached at Bali. It will be what we call “deep process”. It will launch a process for eventual agreement on a commitments regime post-2012.