Copenhagen’s ended. So what have we got? The “Copenhagen Accord”, a 2-and-a-half-page document of vague commitments (the BBC does a good job of explaining the key points here). Not a legally-binding treaty – and they haven’t even set a date for creating one.
Crucially, there are no numbers and no dates mentioned in the document. Not even a global target of how much the planet should reduce emissions by 2050, let alone targets for each country. The closest it gets is saying it “recognises the scientific view that” global temperature increase should be kept below 2 degrees Celsius.
UN deals are normally arrived at through consensus: not this one. The Accord was worked out in a small chat between the United States, China, India, Brazil and South Africa, and the UN has “taken note” of it, not approved it. I’m not sure what’s happened to the text they’ve been negotiating for the past two years since Bali in 2007 – did that get thrown out the window, or just pushed into a corner?
Our “leaders” who spent hours agonising over the deal have tried to put a positive spin on it. Ban Ki Moon, UN Secretary General, said: “The ‘Copenhagen Accord’ may not be everything everyone had hoped for, but this decision … is an important beginning.” Gordon Brown: it’s a “vital first step”. Barack Obama: “I believe that what we achieved in Copenhagen is not going to be the end, but rather the beginning.”
It’s as if they’re squinting at a picture they’ve spent hours painting and saying “well, if you squeeze your eyelids real tight so they’re almost touching and then look sideways at it, then it looks alright” – because it’s so smudged and blurry, the original hoped-for image lost after two weeks of daubing and remixing old paint colours.
The language has shifted: what was a deadline, the climax of two years of the “road map” decided on in Bali in 2007, has now become a “beginning”. But however much you play with words and squint your eyes, this was an opportunity missed. After 17 years of the UNFCCC, carbon dioxide continues to be pumped into our one and only atmosphere – from coal-fired power plants, from factories, from cars, planes, cutting down trees. People in vulnerable places continue without guaranteed cash to help them adapt to the impacts of climate change.
The world continues to heat up. Despite the fact that we know it is heating up due to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere put there by human activity. We know we can stop it. But at the moment we are not stopping it.
The world carries on – but not quite the same as before.
We’ve just seen “the biggest meeting of heads of state and government in the history of the United Nations and possibly in history,” according to UNFCCC Information Officer John Hay.
More importantly, a global movement of people has been galvanised.
The campaign organised by 350.org has “altered both the tone and substance of these negotiations”, according to delegates who approached 350.org campaigners at the summit. On 24th October, 5200 events in 181 countries highlighted the importance of a treaty based on the science. As the conference took place, thousands of people fasted for climate justice.
12th December saw another global day of action, organised by tcktcktck, with thousands of candlelit vigils and massive marches in major cities. 100,000 people from numerous and varied organisations marched in a huge demonstration in Copenhagen itself.
In the last few days, a petition organised by Avaaz was signed by nearly 15 million people and read out on Wednesday during a sit-in on the floor of the conference centre by youth delegates.
40,000 marched through London on 5th December for “The Wave”, the UK’s biggest climate demo yet.
That kind of thing doesn’t just stop after two-and-a-half pages of an “accord” is waved in our faces. We’re not done yet.
So – Mexico City, December 2010. At least protestors won’t be freezing in the cold next time. Hasta luego, amigos…
I’m mid-way through packing up ready to leave uni tonight - but there’s so much going on in Copenhagen, I thought I’d write a really quick one anyway.
First up, check out this rap by the incredible Josh from the UK Youth Delegation on the streets of chilly Copenhagen.
Second up, some news. Apologies for the conciseness - I’ve got to go catch a train soon, but I’ll write you a super-blog tomorrow to make up for it.
Status of the talks: still no agreement in sight.
Heads of government from more than 115 countries are going to take over the talks tomorrow.
Generally, the whole place seems pretty chaotic. The UNFCCC who’ve organised the conference allowed 40,000 people to register for a venue of 15,000. Result: thousands of people left queuing in the cold on Tuesday, unsure why they weren’t being let in. Loads of NGOs and observers are now being denied entrance - pretty frustrating for people who’d booked travel and hotels etc and are now facing a wasted trip. Most of the youth delegates have been blocked from entering too. But even for those inside the conference centre, it’s getting increasingly difficult to work out what state the negotiations are in, with more and more meetings being held behind closed doors.
Some youth delegates have staged a sit-in in the conference centre itself. They were pushed around by the security guards but didn’t face nearly such an ordeal as protestors outside the conference centre - there was a massive “Reclaim Power” protest yesterday, at which the police were being very heavy-handed - people under arrest were forced to sit for hours on the freezing ground, without being permitted access to toilet facilities, water or medical attention.
Hilary Clinton has arrived in Copenhagen and pledged US support for a $100 billion climate fund to help poorer countries adapt to the impacts of climate change.
And developing countries appear to have won their battle against replacing or downgrading the Kyoto Protocol, which was created in 1997 and is currently in force. The thing with Kyoto (as you may well know) is that not all countries ratified it - notably the USA. So since then, alongside the Kyoto negotiations there have been other negotiations which have included the USA. The downside of keeping Kyoto is that its name is hugely unpopular with the US public so it would be harder to get the US to sign up to a new version of the old treaty. However, a big plus of Kyoto is that it acknowledges “common but differentiated responsibilities” - that means it says those who’ve polluted most should do most to clean up the mess.
Ok, so this was quite long in the end! All eyes on Copenhagen tomorrow, on the last day of talks.
Obama arrives in Copenhagen tomorrow: follow this link to send him an email asking him to step up to the challenge of securing a fair and binding deal.
Last night, I went to listen to a guy called Dan Box talk about his journey to the Carteret Islands. Before arriving, I had no idea where these islands were or how he could possibly fill an hour chatting about them. By the time he’d finished talking, I was left with a complex cocktail of thoughts – one of those cocktails that tastes exotic, a bit strange, but hits your taste buds with sparklingly delicious sensations. Because he gave me lots to think about - and I like thinking.
Dan went to the Carteret Islands because he’d heard that was the first place on Earth to be evacuated due to the impacts of climate change. Combination of factors – the flat islands themselves are slowly sinking due to plate tectonics; the sea level is inching upwards due to increased inputs of meltwater and thermal expansion, and increased storminess is eroding the coastline so the sea creeps in. Sometimes it gushes in – and over the top, leaving the soil salty and killing off the islanders’ food plants. It leaves pools of stagnant water, too, where mosquitoes breed: in the two weeks Dan spent there, two children died of malaria. That’s pretty significant for a population of 1000 or so.
Before he embarked on his journey, he discovered that Captain Carteret, the first white man to arrive at the Carterets, got there in 1767, killed a few of the islanders, stole their coconuts, and left. Dan realised that what he was planning on doing could be a 21st century version of that – arrive, watch the evacuation take place, get a good story to sell, and leave, without doing anything to help the people he’d come to spectate. There’s an extent to which you can’t avoid doing that – but on the whole, he approached the trip with a large dose of humility that the old Captain seemed to have lacked.
It occurred to me that humility is also lacking in the rich countries’ approach to the Copenhagen talks. What this climate deal must not be, is the rich white people arriving on the island, killing some locals and stealing their coconuts. It is an unfortunate part of my identity as a Brit that many of my ancestors were probably involved in a good deal of that sort of thing. To skate over an incredibly complicated and diverse set of histories: the sorry story of colonialism means that “developed” countries like Britain have done pretty well out of the countries that we today label as “developing”.
I asked Dan whether the islanders felt a sense of injustice in having to leave their home, their buried dead, their history, because of changes to the world’s climate system brought about largely by the fossil-fuel-burning and deforestation carried out by countries such as Britain. “Yes”, he answered simply. It’s not just a matter of who is responsible for causing these changes. It’s also a matter of who can afford to pay for adapting to these changes. The Carteret islanders are mainly subsistence farmers; they don’t have the money to build sea walls that withstand ever-larger Pacific waves. They told Dan that his country should be providing compensation.
You can see why the African bloc walked out of the negotiations yesterday, citing rich countries’ reluctance to commit to binding emissions reductions. They know that the planet - atmospheric physics, ecosystem functioning, ocean chemistry - does not listen to protestations about what is “politically realistic” in the USA or Poland or wherever. They know that unless serious cuts in emissions are made, the impacts of climate change will be severe, and the first countries to feel those impacts will be those with the least resources to cope. If a deal is signed at Copenhagen that isn’t in line with what the science suggests is needed, there’s not much point in signing it. The deal must be adequate and it must be just.
P.S. If you want to help to build public pressure for a “real deal”, you can join 10 million other people and sign a petition here. It will be delivered to world leaders as they arrive at the conference this week.
We’re about to hit the final week of negotiations.
Can’t help but feel pretty powerless right now. I’m typing away in my student room. I’ve been trying to plan a week of studying - my dissertation and I haven’t really bonded recently. I keep getting distracted, organising global days of action and the like. And it’s hard to sit studiously still in a library whilst knowing that across the North Sea, people are negotiating my future.
But yeah – once you’ve marched through London as one of 40,000 people; once you’ve performed a night-time flashdance in front of the Houses of Parliament, shouting “Don’t hold back!” to the beats of Galvanise; once you’ve written another letter to your MP – it gets a bit scary, because you suddenly realise you’re in their hands.
However, I’ve given this some more thought. And I’ve decided I’m not as scared as I thought I was.
Bibi van der Zee has written a piece suggesting that displays of climate change themed art around Copenhagen are pointless. I disagree. Copenhagen is not just about getting some negotiators to sign a fair, ambitious and binding deal – although I will be jolly well annoyed if they do not (to put it very politely). Copenhagen is also making us get our heads around the challenges we humans have created for ourselves. Not just heating up the planet – although that is a pretty hefty problem. We have created other, perhaps more entrenched, challenges; climate change is behaving like a theatre’s follow-spot operator, throwing a glaring white light onto the complexities and injustices of the human world. New policies are necessary, but not sufficient, for sorting all this out.
The artists who have produced work inspired by climate change, in Copenhagen and elsewhere, are also doing some negotiating. They’re negotiating what climate change means for the way we think and the way we value.
It’s not all in the hands of “Them” – the politicians and policy-makers. Even if they do get the deal we need, that doesn’t just magically “solve” the “problem” of climate change. We’re still going to have to sit down and think about the things that art and music, novels and films make us think about.
Also, some things really encourage me. 100,000 people took to the streets in Copenhagen alone on Saturday – not to mention countless other rallies across the planet. That is pretty cool. And my MP emailed me back last week, saying he happened to have been standing next to Ed Miliband, the Climate Change Minister, when he read my email – so he brought it up with him then and there. And dancing on Parliament Square while the Houses of Parliament were emblazoned with the slogan “The World Wants a Real Deal” was just SO MUCH FUN.
I’m not going to write a conclusion, because there is so much left to be concluded. Ministers are arriving in Copenhagen as I type. On Thursday, more than 110 heads of state will rock up. It seems many developing countries are wary of being pressured into signing a weak agreement. There’s a lot of work to be done this week.
Today was a Global Day of Action on climate change, with thousands of events taking place across the planet.
For a start, there was an enormous march through the streets of Copenhagen, with an estimated 100,000 people braving the chilly Danish air. There’s a first-hand account of the march on Grist which, unlike most of the big media outlets, doesn’t focus exclusively on the tiny minority of people who got violent. Violence is eye-catching so the actions of a few can swamp the peaceful actions of the many. The police seem to have been making extensive use of their new powers (for example, Denmark’s parliament recently gave police the power to arrest people who they think might be about to break the law - before they’ve actually done anything). An estimated 900 protestors were arrested. Climate Justice Action have accused the police of violating human rights.
Meanwhile, the tcktcktck campaign coordinated a call for a “Real Deal” on climate change. Thousands of candlelit vigils are taking place over the weekend, as well as concerts, dancing, mural-making and demonstrations. Here in the UK, activists managed to project the campaign’s logo onto the Houses of Parliament for a good 15 minutes until the London bobbies got wise and switched it off.
Nearby, a group of young people organised by the UK Youth Climate Coalition performed a spirited 4-minute torch-lit “flashdance” in front of the House of Lords, to the tune of The Chemical Brothers’ Galvanise, shouting “Don’t hold back!” - on securing a fair, ambitious and binding climate deal:
And finally…
Franny Armstrong, director of the film The Age of Stupid, interviewed Ed Miliband while standing on her head.
Ed Miliband, the UK’s Climate Change Minister, has now landed in Copenhagen and he says he is prepared for “the final push”. I should think so too. The United Nations have been having these negotiations since I was 4 years old. You would think they might just about be prepared to get a sensible global deal on climate change by now.
After a lot of discussion, the European Union has today agreed to donate $3.6 billion a year for the next three years, to help poorer countries adapt to the impacts of climate change. Britain, France and Germany are each contributing about 20%.
That sounds like a lot of money - and compared to my student loan, it is - yet let me just check how much money was spent by the UK to bail out the banks… Hm, £850 billion so far. In fact, the Royal Bank of Scotland is demanding £1.5 billion in bonuses for 5000 bankers. That is almost half of the entire amount pledged by the EU today. So how many Africans is one RBS banker worth?
The issue of finance is a big one at Copenhagen. A negotiator from the African Union reckons the main thing standing in the way of a deal is whether rich countries will come up with funding for poorer countries who are likely to be hit hardest by the impacts of climate change, have less money to deal with them - oh, and have done the least to create the problem. You can see this if you look at this map showing the amount of carbon emitted per average person, for each country of the world.
The EU also made a “conditional” pledge to reduce emissions by 30% by 2020 - they’re saying “I will if you will” to the other rich countries. It’s so that they still have something to bargain with, apparently. But it doesn’t really make sense in terms of the planet Earth, which doesn’t do bargaining. When the sea level has risen by one metre (which it might do before people born today are 90 years old), and we’re canoeing down Oxford Street, it won’t really help to say “well we didn’t want to cut our emissions too much because no one else said they would”. Come on EU, show some more leadership and make me proud to live here! Please?
P.S. Will someone please tell me why such an ridiculous man as Christopher Monckton sits in the British House of Lords? Yesterday in the Copenhagen conference centre, he told a group of young international climate campaigners that they were the “Hitler Youth”… I can’t do the story justice - read the transcript of the conversation here. And then watch this hilarious rap battle between Monckton and Al Gore.
The impression I get is that the world still hasn’t been saved. Day Four of the conference has just come to an end, and suddenly two weeks does not seem like a very long time to build a global deal on climate change.
I’ve just been chatting with a UK Youth Delegate, who’s not feeling very up-beat about the way the negotiations are going. The negotiations aren’t looking that up-beat either; in fact, they completely ground to a halt yesterday.
Stopped.
Nothing.
…
The reason why the talks stalled yesterday is that Tuvalu, a small Pacific island state that is seriously threatened by sea level rise, made a proposal. Half of the countries present wanted to discuss Tuvalu’s proposal, and half did not - they couldn’t get agreement on whether to discuss the proposal, so stopped talking to each other. This sparked off a big protest outside the main meeting hall, of campaigners supporting Tuvalu.
Tuvalu’s proposal? It wants countries to sign up to making sure that the world’s temperature does not increase by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than its temperature 250 years ago (that was when we (especially Brits) started burning lots of fossil fuels and emitting big amounts of carbon). This is asking for a lot more than is being discussed at the moment. For example, the European Union has committed itself to preventing a 2 degrees temperature rise.
2 degrees C doesn’t sound like much - but remember these are average global temperatures we’re talking about. The world has already warmed up by about 0.8 degrees C since the Industrial Revolution, and we are already seeing the impacts of that - melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and changes in the ranges of certain plant and animals as their homes get too hot for them. If we keep heating up, there are all kinds of feedback mechanisms that come into play, which mean the planet heats up even more. There’s a really good description of how this science works, and what it means for humankind, in Leo Murray’s short and very arty animation.
The talks did get going again, stuttering and spluttering along like the old Vauxhall Astra we used to take on family holidays, forcing it up steep Alpine roads. The road to Copenhagen has been very steep, and it seems to be stretching out past Copenhagen, well into next year.
What is needed, I feel, is a global day of action. Where people in thousands of locations across the planet join together to remind negotiators that they are negotiating survival. [Checks diary] - oh, fab! There’s one on Saturday! Find out what’s happening near you on the tcktcktck website (I’ll be at Old Palace Square in Westminster, London, for a candlelit vigil followed by a glow-in-the-dark “flashdance” a bit like this organised by the UK Youth Climate Coalition). And if there’s not one near you, there’s still time to set one up. Even my home village in Derbyshire has organised one, despite the fact that most of the inhabitants have four legs and woolly fleeces.
So, the conference has begun! With much fanfare and pages of newspaper coverage. Not much in the way of discussion happens on the first day - there’s just a lot of speeches as countries outline their starting positions. The Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (who write reports on the latest climate science) reminded everyone about all the scary stuff going on - melting glaciers, more powerful hurricanes - you know the drill.
There was a promising development from the USA - their Environmental Protection Agency has announced that (shock horror!) carbon dioxide is a danger to human health. This means they can get on with regulating emissions from those industries that produce a lot of this “dangerous” gas, without having to wait for laws to be passed by Congress. Some people reckon this might allow President Obama to sign up to a high-level political agreement.
The Saudi Arabian negotiator tried to insinuate that the science of climate change isn’t settled. Of course it isn’t - science does not settle! But it produces evidence, and there is a lot of evidence to support the idea that the climate changes we’re observing at the moment are due to the activity of me and you and our 6 billion neighbours. I mean, how much evidence do these “deniers” want to see? A wise friend of mine (alright, my Dad) likes to use this analogy: imagine your child suddenly becomes very ill. 95 doctors tell you she has leukemia. 5 doctors tell you she probably doesn’t have leukemia, and even if she did it isn’t their fault, and even if it is their fault, it’s too late to do anything about it now. Whose advice do you take?
Young people have been reminding the negotiators just who they are negotiating on behalf of. Yesterday a bunch of youth delegates performed an energetic (and pretty groovy) “flashdance” outside the plenary hall (that’s the big main conference room), calling for strong action and climate justice.
Things so far aren’t looking great, especially as there’s now some hoo-hah about a leaked document. Turns out some rich countries have been drafting a secret agreement that would allow their people to emit twice as much as people from poorer countries in 2050. That’s kind of like me eating a load of chocolate cake, and then you saying you want some chocolate cake too, and then me telling you “ok, you can have some chocolate cake, but only half as much as me because I’ve already eaten loads of chocolate cake”.
So: that global climate change deal doesn’t seem to be in sight just yet. If you’re looking for something to try and speed it along, you could try this campaign from 38 degrees to get Europe to commit to cutting its emissions by 30% by 2020 (at the moment they say only 20%, which is nowhere near enough) - it’ll only take a few minutes, and it’s a bit urgent so I’d recommend it.
Yes, I know today is technically Day 1 of Copenhagen, but this blog is going to lag realtime by about one day, so that I’ve got time to get to grips with what’s happened. So today I am writing about yesterday.
Yesterday, on the eve of the official conference, more than 1500 young people held a conference of their own, to do two things (Dave, a youth delegate from the UK, gives a great description in his blog). Firstly, as youth delegates, they needed to prepare themselves for the upcoming two weeks - sharing skills and getting clued-up. Secondly, they were building a movement - getting inspired by like-minded people from across the world, and working together to bring about the fair, equitable and binding deal that is needed at Copenhagen.
To try and increase the diversity of voices represented at Copenhagen, they have fundraised £300,000 to bring youth delegates from developing countries. Josh from the UK Youth Delegation explains: “Western governments still can’t agree on how to provide funding to those worst affected by climate change - so we’ve taken it upon ourselves to show them how it’s done”.
The UK Youth Delegation has fundraised £11,000 to support eight delegates from Kenya, where the effects of climate change are already being felt. “Climate change is a life and death issue for us. Food production has dropped, water scarcity is biting” says Waiganjo Njoroge from the Kenyan branch of the African Youth Initiative on Climate Change.
Oh, and if any of you are feeling left out of the action, there are ways you can make a difference back here in the UK! Prime Minister Gordon Brown, said on Friday: “Young people are sending letters to me about climate change more than any other issue. It is these letters I receive that give this government the mandate to act.”
In other words: the more people that demand action on climate change, the more likely it is to happen. So get writing!
In a radio interview I did for the BBC World Service today (you can listen here if you want - it’s 34 minutes into the programme) I was asked whether I felt optimistic about the Copenhagen conference. Tricky question, but I think on balance I don’t see much point in pessimism - we’ve got to keep demanding what is needed, and not stop until we get it. That’s a fair, ambitious and binding agreement that is grounded in the science, by the way.
Hi! Welcome to my blog, a young person’s perspective on the Copenhagen climate conference. I’ll be posting here throughout the two weeks of United Nations talks, which start tomorrow (Monday) and last until Friday 18th December.
Stories in the news about climate change can all get a bit baffling - for two reasons:
1) The changes happening to our climate, weather patterns, and the range of life on Earth, are pretty complicated. It’s hard enough trying to get a hold on what’s happening right now, let alone predict what’s going to happen in 10, 20 or 100 years’ time.
2) People are complicated too! Perhaps even more complicated than the climate. We’ve arranged ourselves into different countries with different needs and wants. What’s more, each country is made up of many different groups of people who don’t necessarily have the same needs and wants either.
So bringing together all the countries of the world for a humongous meeting to sort out climate change is not going to be simple. And it doesn’t help that when people talk about science or politics, they start speaking what seems like a whole new language of science-speak and politics-speak that can often be difficult for people like me and you to understand.
On this blog, I’m going to be updating you on what’s going on. I’ll be using information from the world’s media, the UK’s official negotiating team, and from friends of mine in the UK Youth Delegation who are in Copenhagen as I write, working with young people from across the globe to hold our governments to account.
Why do I think a young person’s perspective is important? Firstly, we are the people alive today who will feel most the impacts of decisions made at Copenhagen. This is because the carbon emissions we emit today have impacts in years to come. The changes in the Earth’s climate that we are seeing now, are due to people years ago burning fossil fuels. This means that the people in suits negotiating in Copenhagen won’t be around to see the impacts of their decisions - but we, young people, will.
Secondly, the language used by politicians and scientists and the media can often exclude young people from the debate because it is so darn confusing. Hopefully, this blog will be easier to understand (please do tell me if anything doesn’t make sense) - so you can get debating with your friends and family!