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Telegraph - Hot air, hypocrisy and a revolution in Bali. By Charles Clover

As an exhibition of hypocrisy, the UN climate change conference in Bali takes some beating. The Indonesian President Yudhoyono is there, playing delegates the video of a song he wrote about saving the planet, while his government, though making splendidly conservationist noises, presides over an orgy of illegal logging that it is powerless, or unwilling, to stop.

Then there are the carbon emissions of the 15,000 delegates, environmentalists, journalists and carbon traders who travelled to the summit. Perhaps you expected the Czech chairman of the European Parliament’s environment committee to have given the subject of offsetting a moment’s thought before he arrived, with his pretty assistant, to stay in the outrageously lavish Conrad resort at Nusa Dua. But he conceded he hadn’t.

There are things about the whole UN process that seem designed to make ordinary folk spit. Everyone accepts that the best we can expect at the end of what Yvo de Boer, the most senior climate change official in the UN, rightly called an extraordinary year for climate change (all those IPCC reports, the G8, even a conference in the United States) is an agreement to begin negotiations on a two-year process leading up to Copenhagen in 2009. Isn’t negotiating what these people have been up to this past fortnight?

The abuse of language and logic by the international diplomatic community makes people outside the Westin compound in Bali simmer with fury. The vast majority of those on the inside track, including the amiable but lentil-eating Hilary Benn, will try to convince you that negotiations which will involve the whole world, including the United States, are a big deal.

But that’s only if they come off. You do wonder why, given that climate change is so important, a dozen people can’t just be locked in a room and told to stay there until they have decided on a masterplan - one that includes saving Indonesia’s dwindling forests, which will have dwindled a whole lot more by the time this post-2012 treaty comes into force.

Imagine what kind of carbon credits carbon traders use.