Saturday, 26 December 2009
Wednesday, 23 December 2009
We're not quite that stupid
It's a week now since I left Copenhagen. I've had four good nights of sleep in a row, a luxury I've not enjoyed for quite some time. And I've had many, many conversations about The COP. So here are my final impressions.
The Americans have landed
There were a vast number of American delegates. At a rough guess, perhaps a third of the people I met were from US NGOs, there to put across the ideas of the American environmental movement. They left me impressed with their enthusiasm and suggested a massive pent up desire for change in America.
Everyone talks
Inside the talks - if you could get inside that is - the approachability of delegates was remarkable. Its as if everyone was there on the same terms. You could walk up to anyone, introduce yourself and ask pertinent questions. In this way I came across national delegates, a vice chair of the IPCC, the heads of a few NGOs and power companies, and all willing to talk and say what they thought openly. The transparency of the process was impressive.
I won't be asking UNFCCC to organise my wedding
If there's one organisation that came out of this incredibly badly it was UN FCCC. By the end of the conference, they had succeeded in alienating most of the NGO representatives who would have arrived as supporters of FCCC and what it aimed to do. And they just did it through logistical stupidity.
You can't tell people that they've a ticket to an event half way around the World, let them book and pay for their flights and hotels in one of the World's most expensive cities, then tell them when they turn up that they can't come in. Really, it's a very, very bad plan and it played right into the hands of the countries that wanted to see UN FCCC and Kyoto dead. Who got what they wanted.
We're not dead yet
People keep asking me whether I think Copenhagen was a disaster. If you think in the sort of terms that Greenpeace think, where every unnecessary death or extinction is an unforgivable tragedy, then yes, Copenhagen was an utter disaster. But then so is eating meat, so is taking a flight, so is being born a human being. That mindset imagines a utopia where the red in tooth and claw nature of existence has been surpassed by some pseudo-divine balance between man and nature.
Nature is not like that. Humanity is just the latest natural disaster to hit the Earth, just as the meteorite (or whatever it was) wiped out the dinosaurs, or the ice ages destroyed the landscapes of the past.
That we have the capacity at all to mitigate this disaster is unprecedented in nature, and that we are making serious efforts to do so is a wonder given the savagery that lies within us. Only a few years ago our fellow citizens of Earth were hacking each others limbs off by the millions in Rwanda and Bosnia, and these were in many cases sensible, educated middle class people, just like us. For many in the World, life is still Hobbesian.
When I first began to pay attention to climate change back in 1990, I certainly didn't realise how serious the problem would turn out to be, nor did I think that within 20 years we'd have come as far as we have. Many major nations have reduced their emissions. Most now are serious about doing so at some level, as shown by the Copenhagen Accord. And the rich, those of us who built our wealth by emitting most of the GHGs currently in the atmosphere, have begun to accept our responsibility for reducing the effects this is having on the poor.
20 years is a short time in global geopolitics. Fixing the ozone layer was a trivial problem but took half that time. Reducing global nuclear proliferation has been ongoing now for 50 years and is still not finished. As the impacts of climate change begin to bite over the coming couple of decades and as technology improves, we will develop tighter targets and better approaches, perhaps based on sectoral restraints rather than national ceilings. It will take more floods in Saudi Arabia, more sand-storms in China, more famines for the poor, more devastated harvests in the American mid-West, more rivers running through Knightsbridge. But it will come.
Yes, for those who sought an instant pot-noodle agreement that would fix everything, Copenhagen was a great disappointment. Yes, there will be unnecessary famines, wars, deaths and extinctions. But no, we should not give up hope. We'll get there in the end, and yes the solution will be more expensive and difficult because it's late, but if we don't we'll be dead. And we're not quite that stupid.
Check back with me in another 20 years. Merry Christmas.
The Americans have landed
There were a vast number of American delegates. At a rough guess, perhaps a third of the people I met were from US NGOs, there to put across the ideas of the American environmental movement. They left me impressed with their enthusiasm and suggested a massive pent up desire for change in America.
Everyone talks
Inside the talks - if you could get inside that is - the approachability of delegates was remarkable. Its as if everyone was there on the same terms. You could walk up to anyone, introduce yourself and ask pertinent questions. In this way I came across national delegates, a vice chair of the IPCC, the heads of a few NGOs and power companies, and all willing to talk and say what they thought openly. The transparency of the process was impressive.
I won't be asking UNFCCC to organise my wedding
If there's one organisation that came out of this incredibly badly it was UN FCCC. By the end of the conference, they had succeeded in alienating most of the NGO representatives who would have arrived as supporters of FCCC and what it aimed to do. And they just did it through logistical stupidity.
You can't tell people that they've a ticket to an event half way around the World, let them book and pay for their flights and hotels in one of the World's most expensive cities, then tell them when they turn up that they can't come in. Really, it's a very, very bad plan and it played right into the hands of the countries that wanted to see UN FCCC and Kyoto dead. Who got what they wanted.
We're not dead yet
People keep asking me whether I think Copenhagen was a disaster. If you think in the sort of terms that Greenpeace think, where every unnecessary death or extinction is an unforgivable tragedy, then yes, Copenhagen was an utter disaster. But then so is eating meat, so is taking a flight, so is being born a human being. That mindset imagines a utopia where the red in tooth and claw nature of existence has been surpassed by some pseudo-divine balance between man and nature.
Nature is not like that. Humanity is just the latest natural disaster to hit the Earth, just as the meteorite (or whatever it was) wiped out the dinosaurs, or the ice ages destroyed the landscapes of the past.
That we have the capacity at all to mitigate this disaster is unprecedented in nature, and that we are making serious efforts to do so is a wonder given the savagery that lies within us. Only a few years ago our fellow citizens of Earth were hacking each others limbs off by the millions in Rwanda and Bosnia, and these were in many cases sensible, educated middle class people, just like us. For many in the World, life is still Hobbesian.
When I first began to pay attention to climate change back in 1990, I certainly didn't realise how serious the problem would turn out to be, nor did I think that within 20 years we'd have come as far as we have. Many major nations have reduced their emissions. Most now are serious about doing so at some level, as shown by the Copenhagen Accord. And the rich, those of us who built our wealth by emitting most of the GHGs currently in the atmosphere, have begun to accept our responsibility for reducing the effects this is having on the poor.
20 years is a short time in global geopolitics. Fixing the ozone layer was a trivial problem but took half that time. Reducing global nuclear proliferation has been ongoing now for 50 years and is still not finished. As the impacts of climate change begin to bite over the coming couple of decades and as technology improves, we will develop tighter targets and better approaches, perhaps based on sectoral restraints rather than national ceilings. It will take more floods in Saudi Arabia, more sand-storms in China, more famines for the poor, more devastated harvests in the American mid-West, more rivers running through Knightsbridge. But it will come.
Yes, for those who sought an instant pot-noodle agreement that would fix everything, Copenhagen was a great disappointment. Yes, there will be unnecessary famines, wars, deaths and extinctions. But no, we should not give up hope. We'll get there in the end, and yes the solution will be more expensive and difficult because it's late, but if we don't we'll be dead. And we're not quite that stupid.
Check back with me in another 20 years. Merry Christmas.
Saturday, 19 December 2009
What goes on Tuesday stays on Tuesday
There's an old saying in England - what goes on tour, stays on tour - and some of the stuff that went on on Tuesday was commercially sensitive. As a result, the story of Tuesday is a bit dull for the simple reason that I need to exercise some sensible self-censorship and not give away commercial secrets.
The day began with our morning briefing, where our senior execs would revise the schedule for the day ahead. At 1030 we were due to meet with one of the most senior environmental policy executives in the World, X, the leader of Organisation Y. Then at 1pm there was the CDP event where our CTO was due to speak. Despite the massive mayhem of yesterday and the colder weather that was pressing in, there was no reason to shake up the schedule for today so we stuck to plan A.
Our meeting with X was due to happen in a very beautiful old mansion house, on the side of a Copenhagen square. We got there a bit early, and as luck would have it arrived at exactly the same moment as X. She ushered us into her office, a magnificent set of rooms with a beautiful view overlooking the square. As far as I could tell was bigger than the flat that I'm trying to buy in London. London property prices are a killer ... The square was filled with exhibits about the environment, so we were looking down on a collection of satellites, huge photos of the beauty of the environment, and graphs of the nightmare scenarios of global temperature rises. Her top team of four directors - who were also around for the COP - joined us.
The conversations opened with discussion of the COP. All of Organisation Y's team were exhausted, having worked late into the night on many nights working the negotiations. All of them had even bigger bags under their eyes than I did. Under the circumstances, it was incredibly generous of them to give us an hour and a half of their time. At this stage, they all still felt that there would be a good agreement out of the COP.
The long and the short of our meeting with X (and really all that I can say) was that we found we had a lot in common both between our general work and the innovations work I'm leading in our business and the things Organisation Y are planning for the future, and given that organisation's enormous influence that is very promising indeed.
From there we went to Crowne Plaza hotel for the Carbon Disclosure Project we were sponsoring. This was well attended and our CTO did a good job of getting our point of view across to the assembled delegates. The points we were trying to get across all seem a bit academic, but are important. Because there are growing numbers of environmental rules and regulations, the administrative and measurement costs of meeting these are growing to the point where for big organisations just reporting the numbers to environmental agencies can run into millions of euros/pounds/dollars per year. And our point is that there are some tricks of the trade that can be applied to cut these costs and make your reporting more reliable at the same time, and we happen to know quite a lot about these tricks.
The other point we made was that the trend towards using accounting methodologies to address environmental problems is probably unwise. Accounting methods are designed to keep track of money that can be counted in pounds, shillings and pence, to an accuracy of pence even in huge organisations. Keeping track of money to this level of accuracy is essential for any organisation.
But this approach is total overkill for environmental reporting. For two decades, scientists have been working on methods of accounting for greenhouse gases, ozone destroying substances, air and water pollution, etc etc and these are methods that are based on a thorough understanding that the substances involved are very hard to quantify or keep track of through the "food chain" that is our economy. The methods are based on transparency and verification to reduce uncertainties, not based on penny-by-penny tracking of resources, and cost far, far less to implement than accounting type solutions.
Anyway, these ideas went down well. Our event ended and the rest of the team headed back to our hotel, while I took my final chance to take in the COP before leaving the next day. Prince Charles was due to be speaking at the plenary session at 5pm, so myself and a friend who was also at the COP thought we might be able to blag our way into the event ....
... we were turned away in no uncertain terms by security. Oh well, if you don't try, you never know. :)
The rest of the day was spent in a bit of networking, then heading to bed early. The long day was over.
The day began with our morning briefing, where our senior execs would revise the schedule for the day ahead. At 1030 we were due to meet with one of the most senior environmental policy executives in the World, X, the leader of Organisation Y. Then at 1pm there was the CDP event where our CTO was due to speak. Despite the massive mayhem of yesterday and the colder weather that was pressing in, there was no reason to shake up the schedule for today so we stuck to plan A.
Our meeting with X was due to happen in a very beautiful old mansion house, on the side of a Copenhagen square. We got there a bit early, and as luck would have it arrived at exactly the same moment as X. She ushered us into her office, a magnificent set of rooms with a beautiful view overlooking the square. As far as I could tell was bigger than the flat that I'm trying to buy in London. London property prices are a killer ... The square was filled with exhibits about the environment, so we were looking down on a collection of satellites, huge photos of the beauty of the environment, and graphs of the nightmare scenarios of global temperature rises. Her top team of four directors - who were also around for the COP - joined us.
The conversations opened with discussion of the COP. All of Organisation Y's team were exhausted, having worked late into the night on many nights working the negotiations. All of them had even bigger bags under their eyes than I did. Under the circumstances, it was incredibly generous of them to give us an hour and a half of their time. At this stage, they all still felt that there would be a good agreement out of the COP.
The long and the short of our meeting with X (and really all that I can say) was that we found we had a lot in common both between our general work and the innovations work I'm leading in our business and the things Organisation Y are planning for the future, and given that organisation's enormous influence that is very promising indeed.
From there we went to Crowne Plaza hotel for the Carbon Disclosure Project we were sponsoring. This was well attended and our CTO did a good job of getting our point of view across to the assembled delegates. The points we were trying to get across all seem a bit academic, but are important. Because there are growing numbers of environmental rules and regulations, the administrative and measurement costs of meeting these are growing to the point where for big organisations just reporting the numbers to environmental agencies can run into millions of euros/pounds/dollars per year. And our point is that there are some tricks of the trade that can be applied to cut these costs and make your reporting more reliable at the same time, and we happen to know quite a lot about these tricks.
The other point we made was that the trend towards using accounting methodologies to address environmental problems is probably unwise. Accounting methods are designed to keep track of money that can be counted in pounds, shillings and pence, to an accuracy of pence even in huge organisations. Keeping track of money to this level of accuracy is essential for any organisation.
But this approach is total overkill for environmental reporting. For two decades, scientists have been working on methods of accounting for greenhouse gases, ozone destroying substances, air and water pollution, etc etc and these are methods that are based on a thorough understanding that the substances involved are very hard to quantify or keep track of through the "food chain" that is our economy. The methods are based on transparency and verification to reduce uncertainties, not based on penny-by-penny tracking of resources, and cost far, far less to implement than accounting type solutions.
Anyway, these ideas went down well. Our event ended and the rest of the team headed back to our hotel, while I took my final chance to take in the COP before leaving the next day. Prince Charles was due to be speaking at the plenary session at 5pm, so myself and a friend who was also at the COP thought we might be able to blag our way into the event ....
... we were turned away in no uncertain terms by security. Oh well, if you don't try, you never know. :)
The rest of the day was spent in a bit of networking, then heading to bed early. The long day was over.
Wednesday, 16 December 2009
Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and the mystery lady in the lift
It's Mahmoud Ahmedinejad that I'm sharing my hotel with, according to the nice policeman. Yesterday's copper schmoozing investment wasn't wasted after all it seems.
Eeeek - get the bomb squad! Oh no hang on, they're all here already, and they all have very, VERY large guns all over the hotel. I suspect I'll sleep safe in my bed tonight.
More bizarrely, I met a very well turned out lady of Middle Eastern origin in the lift this morning, who told me her husband was speaking at the UN today. Hmmm .. heads of state day .... she was on her own, looked a bit bored and lonely and politely invited me to join her for breakfast. Of all the days to have an 830am meeting planned. Who knows what might have happened.
In case, dear reader, you're wondering what level of hotel I'm staying at, yes it's nice, but as far as I know the 110 best hotels in Denmark each have a president in them of some colour, shape or origin. And one of them even has Tony Blair - so perhaps sharing a building with Ahmedinejad isn't so bad after all.
The rest of the day was a cracker - talk about making up for yesterday's cock-ups! But it's 2:09am and I should be in bed, as we've a breakfast meeting at 730 before heading home. The tale of technical geeky successes and putting one up on the Global Accounting Conspiracy .. sorry ... Fraternity will have to wait...
Eeeek - get the bomb squad! Oh no hang on, they're all here already, and they all have very, VERY large guns all over the hotel. I suspect I'll sleep safe in my bed tonight.
More bizarrely, I met a very well turned out lady of Middle Eastern origin in the lift this morning, who told me her husband was speaking at the UN today. Hmmm .. heads of state day .... she was on her own, looked a bit bored and lonely and politely invited me to join her for breakfast. Of all the days to have an 830am meeting planned. Who knows what might have happened.
In case, dear reader, you're wondering what level of hotel I'm staying at, yes it's nice, but as far as I know the 110 best hotels in Denmark each have a president in them of some colour, shape or origin. And one of them even has Tony Blair - so perhaps sharing a building with Ahmedinejad isn't so bad after all.
The rest of the day was a cracker - talk about making up for yesterday's cock-ups! But it's 2:09am and I should be in bed, as we've a breakfast meeting at 730 before heading home. The tale of technical geeky successes and putting one up on the Global Accounting Conspiracy .. sorry ... Fraternity will have to wait...
Monday, 14 December 2009
A day that's finally over
Ok, well its bedtime. My hotel is crawling with police, but they won't tell us which head of state is staying here, no matter how much I schmooze the policeman. Spent the early evening making arrangements to ensure that our emissions policy specialist could get in over the next few days. Had to give up all our other passes to make it work - so much for our corporate networking events.
When coming here I thought this would an extraordinary opportunity to see the FCCC in action and meet incredible people. Both have turned out to be true, but in ways least expected.
The contrasts are extraordinary. The stoic Danish hosts for whom conformity and consensus is everything, epitomised by the unfailingly polite police who are everywhere and thoroughly intimidating. The chaotic UN FCCC that seems to be digging its own grave. The masses of people who came here from around the World to make their voices heard as part of the process, whether the vegan lobbyists dressed as chickens wandering inside the conference, the Greenpeace folk who kept us all warm with coffee as we stood around in the subzeros, or the global corporate leaders queueing with the dreadlocked rasta-kids at 7 in the morning in the hope of getting in, but probably didn't. Wow, but maybe not a good wow.
I can't wait to get home to London. But tomorrow is OUR chance to make a difference, the day we say what we came to say to the side event we're supporting. What we came all this way for. So, fingers crossed, bedtime.
When coming here I thought this would an extraordinary opportunity to see the FCCC in action and meet incredible people. Both have turned out to be true, but in ways least expected.
The contrasts are extraordinary. The stoic Danish hosts for whom conformity and consensus is everything, epitomised by the unfailingly polite police who are everywhere and thoroughly intimidating. The chaotic UN FCCC that seems to be digging its own grave. The masses of people who came here from around the World to make their voices heard as part of the process, whether the vegan lobbyists dressed as chickens wandering inside the conference, the Greenpeace folk who kept us all warm with coffee as we stood around in the subzeros, or the global corporate leaders queueing with the dreadlocked rasta-kids at 7 in the morning in the hope of getting in, but probably didn't. Wow, but maybe not a good wow.
I can't wait to get home to London. But tomorrow is OUR chance to make a difference, the day we say what we came to say to the side event we're supporting. What we came all this way for. So, fingers crossed, bedtime.
Chaos and going carbon negative
It has been a ludicrous day. Having spent the last 5 weeks organising a series of meetings and events today for our team to attend, the chaotic logistics of the UNFCCC meant that most of the people who turned up today got turned away. We (well, my bosses and I) started queuing to get in at 740 am this morning, in sub-zero temperatures. By 1030 the queue had moved about 200m and we gave up. So much for the best laid plans of 5 weeks.
I ran into one former work colleague who now works at Chatham house. He gave up the queue at 3pm having waited since 9am. He was utterly frozen when we met him.
So ... if this is how they run a conference, how do they run a treaty ...
I got in for a little while this afternoon on my own and was told there are now three treaty texts running, but they're not being given to non-govrenment delegates. Rumours are that two of them reject Kyoto, but I've no idea if this is true or not.
Met a senior EU & IPCC climatologist, who turned out to be ex-phd supervisor of a friend. He was quite pessimistic, not on the liklihood of an outcome, but of its utility. He reckons there will be an agreement - you don't round up 110 heads of state for a week for nothing - but the science suggests that we have already passed the threshold at which 2 degrees warming could be prevented. And what we need to be doing to prevent it now is planning for a carbon NEGATIVE society within 4 decades. Jaysus that's hard work.
Am looking forward to my bed. Was up until 2 last night finalising arrangements for today, which were all already redundant by 8am this morning.
I ran into one former work colleague who now works at Chatham house. He gave up the queue at 3pm having waited since 9am. He was utterly frozen when we met him.
So ... if this is how they run a conference, how do they run a treaty ...
I got in for a little while this afternoon on my own and was told there are now three treaty texts running, but they're not being given to non-govrenment delegates. Rumours are that two of them reject Kyoto, but I've no idea if this is true or not.
Met a senior EU & IPCC climatologist, who turned out to be ex-phd supervisor of a friend. He was quite pessimistic, not on the liklihood of an outcome, but of its utility. He reckons there will be an agreement - you don't round up 110 heads of state for a week for nothing - but the science suggests that we have already passed the threshold at which 2 degrees warming could be prevented. And what we need to be doing to prevent it now is planning for a carbon NEGATIVE society within 4 decades. Jaysus that's hard work.
Am looking forward to my bed. Was up until 2 last night finalising arrangements for today, which were all already redundant by 8am this morning.
The queue of 20,000
This morning sees the beginning of the second week of the conference, and the arrival of the 20,000 excess delegates.
And the UN is not ready. I'm currently standing with my colleagues close to the front of a 2km long queue of people trying to get in. I've seen heads of major corporations, environmental NGOs and social justice groups standing freezing for three hours in sub-zero temperatures. The reception desk has only 12 people on it.
Unbelievable.
And the UN is not ready. I'm currently standing with my colleagues close to the front of a 2km long queue of people trying to get in. I've seen heads of major corporations, environmental NGOs and social justice groups standing freezing for three hours in sub-zero temperatures. The reception desk has only 12 people on it.
Unbelievable.
The ministers start arriving
So today is the first formal day of our mission. Attended a really, really cool EEA event last night with a showing of a great 1 hour film about how climate change can be stopped, and what will happen if we don't. Ran into a bunch of colleagues from ESA who helped make the film and built the Environmental Atlas that goes with it.
See
www.eea.europa.eu/cop15/bend-the-trend
so you can watch the fil, and you can also sign up to make your pledge to help cut your personal CO2 emissions.
See
www.eea.europa.eu/cop15/bend-the-trend
so you can watch the fil, and you can also sign up to make your pledge to help cut your personal CO2 emissions.
Saturday, 12 December 2009
2 degrees or 1.5?
10am
Finally caught up on my sleep from the week (translates as: "overslept and missed the session on Earth Observation I'd wanted to go to"). Caught a taxi to the COP in a rush and found a secret entrance that gets the cars near the door. This is incredibly useful as some of our delegation need car access otherwise they can't make the meeting timings.
1115am
Found the session with Adnan Pachauri head of the IPCC. Dr Pachauri gave a briefing on AR5, the fifth assessment, basically to the effect that the science review is well underway and there's a substantial focus in it on looking at transport mitigation. I can only assume that here he's referring to Work Groups 2 or 3.
1200
Spent the rest of the morning working on logistics for our mission. It seems that the UN FCCC has overbooked the conference by - i kid you not - 20,000 people. So instead of there being 15000 attending, of whom about 3000 would be national delegations, there have been 35,000 people registered. This explains the absolute mayhem going on.
The UN's response has been to decide to cut all the representations of non-government entities by 2/3rds from Tuesday. This means very considerable rejigging of our mission timetable, moving some key meetings out of the Bella Centre.
2pm
Okay - here's news. Attended a negotiating/discussion session between the business NGOs (BINGOs in UN parlance) and leading parties like the US and EU. This is one of the things we're here for, to help develop recommendations for how to manage sectoral agreements and ensure maximum economic efficiency of the voluntary and obligatory corporate measures.
There's real talk of there being flexibility in whatever arrangements are created, with substantial market mechanisms to encourage mitigation of emissions. Unfortunately as things stand about 100 nations don't really stand to use these kind of mechanisms, so it's not in their interests to support them going into the Draft Text.
However, these are the kind of things that will allow developed countries to smooth their transitions to low-carbon economies in an economically efficient way. So they are needed.
At the end of the meeting, they announce that a draft text has been released for the first time to non-governments!!!
3pm
The draft text is in my hands ... but I've now got to go collect some of our missions from the airport.
6.19pm
Okay, here we go. It talks about
- a target of EITHER 2 degrees or 1.5 degrees - both are good!
- all nations reduce their emissions by either 50% (bad), 85% (now you're talking) or 95% (she's sucking diesel!!);
- Developed countries reducing their emissions by between 75%, 80%, 95% or more than 95% by 2050 on 2020 levels;
- developing nations will cut by 15-30% by 2020 (no baseline given) with the financial and technological support of rich countries;
But most pointedly, the preamble specifically states: "the draft text assumes the adoption of a second commitment period under the [Kyoto] Protocol." Thats not what I heard last night ...
But overall, this looks really promising!
We could be going to save the planet yet.
Finally caught up on my sleep from the week (translates as: "overslept and missed the session on Earth Observation I'd wanted to go to"). Caught a taxi to the COP in a rush and found a secret entrance that gets the cars near the door. This is incredibly useful as some of our delegation need car access otherwise they can't make the meeting timings.
1115am
Found the session with Adnan Pachauri head of the IPCC. Dr Pachauri gave a briefing on AR5, the fifth assessment, basically to the effect that the science review is well underway and there's a substantial focus in it on looking at transport mitigation. I can only assume that here he's referring to Work Groups 2 or 3.
1200
Spent the rest of the morning working on logistics for our mission. It seems that the UN FCCC has overbooked the conference by - i kid you not - 20,000 people. So instead of there being 15000 attending, of whom about 3000 would be national delegations, there have been 35,000 people registered. This explains the absolute mayhem going on.
The UN's response has been to decide to cut all the representations of non-government entities by 2/3rds from Tuesday. This means very considerable rejigging of our mission timetable, moving some key meetings out of the Bella Centre.
2pm
Okay - here's news. Attended a negotiating/discussion session between the business NGOs (BINGOs in UN parlance) and leading parties like the US and EU. This is one of the things we're here for, to help develop recommendations for how to manage sectoral agreements and ensure maximum economic efficiency of the voluntary and obligatory corporate measures.
There's real talk of there being flexibility in whatever arrangements are created, with substantial market mechanisms to encourage mitigation of emissions. Unfortunately as things stand about 100 nations don't really stand to use these kind of mechanisms, so it's not in their interests to support them going into the Draft Text.
However, these are the kind of things that will allow developed countries to smooth their transitions to low-carbon economies in an economically efficient way. So they are needed.
At the end of the meeting, they announce that a draft text has been released for the first time to non-governments!!!
3pm
The draft text is in my hands ... but I've now got to go collect some of our missions from the airport.
6.19pm
Okay, here we go. It talks about
- a target of EITHER 2 degrees or 1.5 degrees - both are good!
- all nations reduce their emissions by either 50% (bad), 85% (now you're talking) or 95% (she's sucking diesel!!);
- Developed countries reducing their emissions by between 75%, 80%, 95% or more than 95% by 2050 on 2020 levels;
- developing nations will cut by 15-30% by 2020 (no baseline given) with the financial and technological support of rich countries;
But most pointedly, the preamble specifically states: "the draft text assumes the adoption of a second commitment period under the [Kyoto] Protocol." Thats not what I heard last night ...
But overall, this looks really promising!
We could be going to save the planet yet.
Friday, 11 December 2009
Kyoto is dead. Pass the Ferrero Rocher would you?
Friday December 11th
9am
Even getting on the plane this morning was exciting. As I walked down the aisle to take my seat at the back, I saw people either side of me reading reading scientific or UN papers, carrying laptops with climate science mission badges or reading through the agenda for their climate justice NGO. I recognised an ill-kept junior civil servant from DECC (not that I'm in a position to throw stones - I've hardly slept this week between a stinking cold and working late and look like my grandfather's dead whippet). But there's that kind sense that you get sometimes when you get on a plane full of people going on holiday - nobody knows each other, but is a little demob happy, aware that there's a sort of common purpose.
3pm
OK I've just arrived at the Bella Centre, where the Conference of Parties is taking place. It's a hideous warehouse in the middle of a deserted wasteland, surrounded by cold looking police in parkas and hippies waving placards. Queuing for registration as an observer, I find myself beside the BP representative on one side (who appears not to have been properly accredited so she wasn't let in. Karma 1 : BP nil), and a bunch of sandal wearing beardies on the other. Then someone introduces the lead sandal wearing beardy as the chief economist of the Stockholm Environment Institute who did the lead critique of the Stern Report.
I move on.
3.15pm
I've got my photo badge and appear to be in what looks a bit like a university Freshers week. Stalls from Stanford University to the International Chamber of Commerce to Greenpeace block the way of the entrants going to the main halls and negotiations. Each stall is about the size of a school boys desk so its a bit comical. I wander past the Heinrich Boll Stiftung stand and stop to ask what that great German writer had to do with the environment. (Boll is renowned on my father's island off the West Coast of Ireland, though mainly because of the Summer house he had there). The man on the stand doesn't actually appear to know who Heinrich Boll was.
Again, I move on.
4pm
Everything here seems so cramped. You're here at the most momentous and historic attempt by human kind to organise itself so as not to wipe itself out, and all that seems to be going on is a circus of new age hippies is waving placards in a half-arsed sort of way at the guys in suits with the pink badges of government representatives, all of whom look very tired.
430pm
The Tuvaly delegation is explaining on TV why they've held up the formal negotiations for two days on a procedural point. It doesn't appear to make a lot of sense.
5pm
By now I've negotiated lunch and a beer and am starting to understand what's going on, largely by virtue of having caught up with a few pals. It seems that the UN has decided that the FCCC has to be very democratic, so they've let every fruitcake who can afford a ticket to Copenhagen come and set up their demos INSIDE the conference centre. These are all shoved together, about 200m away from where the government delegations are. But they get to make their demos at people sitting in cafes inside a nice warm hideous warehouse, while the government reps get on with the hard work of hammering something out in their much nicer cafes in the state delegations section.
My friends tell me that it's all a bit mad. And it really is. It's a circus with 35000 participants.
650pm
Go to collect my coat. Find I have lost my ticket due to a holey pocket. Nice lady tells me that there are 15,000 coats here, and do I really expect to find it? By staggering luck, someone has handed the ticket in and I have my coat in 60 seconds flat.
7pm
Dash to Northwest Copenhagen for dinner at the UK Ambassador's residence. Clearly, I've finally made the A-list!! Yeah right ...
Midnight at my hotel bar
Most interesting conversation. The ambassador gave me the official UK line "UN FCCC just doesn't work, it's going nowhere. Kyoto is finished, we need something new with a new set of institutions." I'd been warned by a mate who works for Sterns office that it might end up like this, with a tug of war between rich and poor and no more UN involved.
So it looks as if the rumours I'd heard in London two weeks ago are true. The rich countries have drafted a new treaty, and so have the poor - sorry - developing countries. And both texts shove Kyoto / UN FCCC / poor old Yvo de Boer out the window, and start all over again. The developing countries are arguing for a 1.5 C limit, but that's fairly unrealistic. In truth because of the 40 year time lag in the ocean-cryophere-atmosphere system, we're probably committed to 1.5 C rise already by 2050 and there's nothing we can do about it.
The other side of the coin is that everything I've heard from various sources today suggests that they WILL reach an agreement, and there will be a $100bn pot of cash for developing countries technology improvement by 2020.
So it's not all a tale of woe, there's hope yet.
By the way, the Ambassador served us Ferrero Rocher. Really. I told him he was spoiling us.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
