From COP-15: Breakdowns Rule the Day in Copenhagen
By Brooks B. Yeager,
Executive Vice President for Policy,
Clean Air-Cool Planet
Today was the day that anything that could break down, did break down. This was true both inside the negotiations and out. First to go was the credentialling system. The problems with the lines of uncredentialled participants, which have been growing since late last week, finally overwhelmed the entrance area of the conference center, with the result that nobody, even those with full credentials and secondary badges, was getting in.
Next to go was the subway system. The crowd became so large – they’re now saying that 40,000 people pre-registered for a conference center that only fits 15,000 — that it backed up throughout the metro platform, with the result that the city authorities decreed that trains on the M1 line would no longer stop at the Bella Center. But even if you got off at an earlier stop, Sundby, and walked the ¾ of a mile to the Center, you still couldn’t get past the crowd. Buses were pulling up six at a time spilling loads of supplicants onto the street, as the ever-expanding crowd milled, stood, and chattered on cell phones in the cold.
Having disabled Copenhagen’s largest conference center and one of its two metro lines, this monster of a negotiation then turned on itself. A set of negotiators representing Africa, which is feeling neglected by the big powers, forced the suspension of the key contact groups as their way to highlight their demand that the Kyoto Protocol be extended. Europe and the U.S. have thrown their weight behind a new negotiating framework, which, unlike Kyoto, would include all parties. China and the U.S. attacked each others’ negotiating offers as weak and unhelpful. Developing countries and environmentalists challenged Europe and the U.S. to strengthen the ambition of their emissions reduction targets, and criticized the offer of $10 billion per year in aid for adaptation and technology development as far too little to meet the need.
With the few ongoing negotiating sessions increasingly off-limits to NGOs, the thousands of representatives of civil society in the halls are becoming increasingly restive and despondent. Having been a negotiator myself during the Clinton Administration, I’m one of the few NGOs who will admit to being glad that there are conversations in the back rooms to which we’re not invited. I only hope that what’s going on there is some serious dialogue on substance, and even some horse trading, as opposed to the hyperventilated rhetoric that passes for ‘position taking’ in the media. The problem outside is not a broken metro – it’s a broken climate system, and it won’t fix itself while we’re ‘taking positions’ in Copenhagen.
Tags: Arctic, arctic policy, arctic warming, climate negotiations, climate policy, conference, COP-15, copenhagen
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