Blog
Copenhadgen Climate Talks
Thursday 17 December was the day Obama and Hilary Clinton arrived along with dozens of heads of state. Interestingly the head of state of China remained in his hotel, holding court with a series of ministers from other countries visiting him in sequence. One was the minister form Japan. On Thursday morning the civil servants were ordered to say nothing to the press.
The media is still allowed inside the formal talks at the Bella Centre, but there were no press conferences. Bolivia walked out on Wednesday. Also on Wednesday in the face of the dirty maneuver by the US negotiators at 2 am (bringing in and insisting on having considered 25 new changes to the Kyoto protocol document text which had already been finalized and agreed by all parties) the Danish president of the proceedings offered a single unifying statement in draft to try to save the day and come out of the negotiations with something. In response to this Danish initiative, the group of 77 refused to participate unless the two tracks were resumed. This means that both the Kyoto protocol draft and the long term planning draft (the US ´other than Kyoto´ploy) would continue to be on the table. The group of 77 prevailed. Thursday a.m. saw the ministers and their aids divided into two groups, one on the Kyoto text and the second focusing on the long term draft. The discussions went on all day and all night. Now they are continuing around the clock until an agreement on both documents is reached or the talks terminate without agreement.
On Wednesday night the youth had a sit in within the Bella Centre and were dragged out, limp, by security. Each had his or her pass recorded. While the removals were in progress the onlooking delegates and media chanted ´the whole world is watching´. The 80 or so young people from around the world insisted that no agreement could be reached without civil society´s voice and especially the voice of youth.
I met a member of the youth delegation from Canada who had videoed the police beating insiders with passes who had left the Bella Centre to try to join the Reclaim Power demonstration on Wednesday a.m. Her footage was shocking. She had uploaded it onto her website and it had received more than 12,000 hits in about 24 hours. Look for a link shortly.
I took a few minutes to visit political activists in hiding and brought them some small comforts. The police are being described as fascist. They are arresting people at random or according to some plan. Those with passes would find that suddenly the electronic machines through which one has to pass the pass like getting into the subway or bank atm, would reject their pass. Others have been grabbed and held. At about 4 pm on Thursday a demonstration was held in solidarity with the 13 arrested and held for the longer term. Usually the hundreds held were quickly released but not these 13. The demonstration was impressive with about 50 mostly Danish protesters speaking briefly and then taping their mouths closed and standing in a line with their backs to the canal very near the heavily barricaded parliament buildings. There were many media people there and these were loosely coordinated by a chief who allowed all photographs to first do close ups and then we moved back as a group to get long shots. It was a very moving stand against silencing of public debate and the erosion of human rights. In the shops around Christiania salespeople told me that the presence of the police was heavy and disturbing. One could hear police sirens throughout the afternoon and into the evening. A heavy snow has immobilized much transport in Denmark, including the trains and metro, and many stations were closed. There was a degree of chaos around transport.
Back at the peoples´assembly at the Klima Forum, sessions on a range of topic continued. These featured Nnimmo Bassey, Yvonne Yanez and others on the efforts to leave the oil under the soil, including the Yasuni project in Ecuador (to get international support to the tune of a third of the market price of oil per barrel of oil not produced from this part in the Amazon).
Then Guardian columnist George Monbiot hosted a massive meeting on what is to be done. This consisted of two short presentations from the stage including one by Monbiot, and then almost two hours of contributions from the really excellent and expert participants from the floor. The issues had to do with the failure of the formal talks, the guidelines for what it is that civil society wants (and here the Klima Forum declaration on system change not climate change was very much the framework) and most crucially, what should we do in the next one year in the build up to yet another formal meeting to conclude a Kyoto protocol for the period after 2011. After fascinating interventions from the floor Monbiot expressed his view on the question of what is to be done in this coming year:
Target the very worst polluters, the corporations contributing the most to the problem of global warming, both at the production of fossil fuels end of the process and at the consumption and combustion end. People from the audience began immediately shouting out the names of these very worst polluters including Aramco, Exxon, Shell, Statoil and others. Monbiot repeated each name into the mic. Then he said he hoped people would go beyond naming to taking action against these climate criminals.
On Friday, the last scheduled day of the climate talks, the agenda in the Klima Forum includes a closing session during which several members of the coordinating committee in charge of the two weeks of events at that Klima Forum will speak and enact a handover to a transition team that will work to build a peoples assembly for the coming meeting in Mexico. One of the members of the current Klima Forum board of coordinators is Wahu Kaara from Kenya. She spoke with me on Thursday evening. She said that in the last two meetings of this coordinating board the idea of an ongoing movement of civil society, internationally, on climate change information and action was explored. This was a changing of gears because originally it was thought that the board would be discontinued after the Copenhagen talks. Now it is proposed that an expanded more representative board be maintained throughout and be focused on assisting sections of global civil society in its efforts to extend and implement a peoples climate change agreement. This is a welcome and highly political step about which more in the near future.
