All sides want the cuts made by everyone to be fair. If there are to be emissions reductions then the developed world will have to make the vast majority of the cuts. However developed countries are likely to think it is not fair if they are making deep cuts in their own emissions while developing countries are not setting or reaching their own targets. It is unfair on those who are making extra cuts to reach their targets if some are willing simply to ignore their targets and carry on polluting as if it was business as usual.

The fairness in GHG cuts will come from the negotiations about how much each country should cut not the enforcement and inspection mechanism.

The European Union has shown that even in a community with common goals and a willingness to get to those goals together countries cannot always be trusted. Countries in the EU regularly do not fully implement EU regulations or if they do they often do not enforce them. Governments regularly announce targets for reducing climate change and then come nowhere near meeting them. International inspectors are needed to name and shame those who are not living up to their commitments.

No amount of inspections are going to make countries be trustable so why waste the effort?

Developed nations are going to be funding many initiatives to reduce emissions in developing countries and will hopefully be transferring technology to help with this. In such cases the developed countries who are paying for reductions in emissions have a right to know that those reductions are really being carried out and how effective their finance and technology has been in reducing emissions.

Developed countries manage to sink billions into aid to developing countries that often seems to end up in the pockets of corrupt officials, why should we expect that scrutiny for funds for climate change would mean that the funds would actually end up anywhere else.

If there is no International scrutiny then countries will simply falsify records and say that they are making cuts when they are not. When countries say that they do not want international scrutiny they are saying they really don’t want the targets and have no intention of sticking to anything they agree to. While there is no international scrutiny any deals done are simply ink on a page that will be seen to bind no one.

If we made Emissions a key part in the value and power of a country then governments would finally have some short-term and "political reason" for wanting to develop enough green energy and reduce emissions...

At the moment, they only do a token-gesture to keep people quiet and create a false image that they are working hard on green energy.

International inspectors are much less likely to come under the influence of business lobbies in the country they are making inspections of.

Inspections do not cause reductions in emissions. If a country is willing to reduce its emissions then it will sign up to targets and it will itself police those targets. If a country does not want to make emissions reductions then no amount of inspections are going to persuade it to do so.

Having wide ranging international scrutiny of greenhouse gas emissions will be costly and be overly bureaucratic. Either the scrutiny will be comprehensive, have powers to make lots of inspections all over the countries they are scrutinising and have a lot of access to the statistics and records of that country which will require a lot of manpower or else they are not going to be effective because they would be too few in number and too constrained in their capabilities and mandate.

Climate change is not an issue that should lead to violations of nations sovereignty in order to get facts and figures. It is not like nuclear proliferation where there is a potentially major threat if there are no international inspections. Rather this is an area that we should be able to trust national governments to stick as closely as possible to the deals they have signed up to in international agreements.

Presumably the USA and other developed nations would be financing their own reductions in their emissions but would be willing to have inspections and oversight of their reductions.

China’s argument is that China finances its own emissions reduction efforts, so it should be exempt from international scrutiny, according to the regulations so the furthest China will go is to agree to international consultations on its emissions reduction initiatives.

The United Nations would be the most obvious body to scrutinise countries emissions however this could well mean building a whole new agency like the IAEA the UNs nuclear watchdog. This would likely mean wrangling about who gets what position within this new body and no matter the results there are bound to be arguments about potential bias, as is shown by the accusations against the IAEA that it has been too soft on Iran over the last few years.