COP19 part VII: The little UN thing that could

So, a bunch of NGOs walked out of the UN climate negotiations today. They were the so-called C7, some of which include Oxfam, WWF (the animal lovers, not the wrestling association), Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Christian Aid and a few others.

There was a press release which was sent to journalsist on behalf of the C7 which basically said that the entire Stadion Narodowy was filled with maggot sycophants who brainlessly dance to the tunes of fossil fuel fiddlers. It blasts the Finance Ministerial for having no discussion about actual finance, the loss and damage talks for being stymied by people that live high above sea level and – getting a bit existential – the COP 19 itself for being a construct of the very people who should be taken out back and shot.

From a certain point of the view, the general expectations of the NGOs about this COP were fairly reasonable. They accepted the whole “let’s all plan to make a plan,” thinking which I wouldn’t even accept from my grandmother. They accepted all the things that follow that; like trying to make dashes on a decade-long timeline on which plans to plan will definitely be planned. They accepted that their consultation was only listened to if it sat squarely in a pre-existing agenda. They knew there would be deal-breakers, side steppers, ducker, weavers and outright liars.

They wanted countries to promise – a word that notoriously flops out of politician’s mouths like dead fish from a sewer pipe – to reduce their emissions from charcoaling lungs to merely blocking nostrils. Generally, they wanted the place to be a venue of change, not a Xanax-driven reunion of apathetic suits.

A large part of the angst that drove them to leave has to do with their expectations. Some of the NGO players here have attended every single COP since it was a little baby – when they themselves were considered to be a bunch of hippies and everyone had two-and-a-half kids, a car and a job at the asbestos plant. Those were hopeful times, when climate change was considered the fantasy of tree-huggers and mushroom trippers, and wearing neon and silly pants was acceptable. 

But the hippies are now in suits and have PhDs in biochemistry and market analytics and degrees in international law. While the same people who have to make the important decisions at the UN climate talks today, are still making decisions as if they still lived back then. 

Somewhere between COP11 and now, the hope has been replaced with the kind of burning anger usually reserved for public transportation and smug people. The result is that every year they downgrade what they hope the decision-makers do, and every year the decision-makers manage to find a newer low to achieve. This time, going into COP 19, the expectations were downright subterranean – applying the amount of hope you’d give a monkey trying to solve a Rubik’s cube in the midst of severe heroine withdrawal. 

What it does affirm is the need to for NGOs to do NGO-type things, like climb oil rigs and make you depressed with pictures of rabbits wearing badly applied mascara. The goal being to mobilize people to actually do something when the people that should don’t.

I made the same complaints I’ve been ranting about in my past six entries to some of my much wiser colleagues. They tend to agree with me, but with the caveat that these types of discussion need to happen somewhere, so they might as well happen where they are supposed to happen. They also talk about the much finer conundrums that the rest of the world would find too complex to handle; like, what if an entire population has to move somewhere because a nearby desert started creeping up on them like a flasher on an empty street. If they’re forced across a foreign border because too many fat people drive cars on a different continent, do they then lose their sovereignty? How will they be settled? Will the settlement become a new state? And what about the state they moved into; do those people then lose a chunk of their land to chapped-lipped migrant strangers?

See? You’re glazing over already. These kinds of nuances have no explosions, no celebrities, no baby pictures and no place at the dinner table. But they are the things, it turns out, which need to be discussed. They are also the things that, despite making an entire profession out of it, still drives policy-makers into Stubborn Onset Catatonia. More ‘policy’ less ‘maker’. 

The thing is, however the subtlety of the discussion, or the fragility of the politics involved, you, me and everyone else, can point at the people who are supposed to make the important decisions and say, “You fucked up.”

19 years of doing that, to the same kinds of people, and yeah, you might finally walk out.

COP19 part VI: The little UN thing that could

Roxanne,

You don’t have to wear that dress tonight.

Walk the street for money,

You don’t care if it’s wrong or if it’s right.

--The Police, 1978

Apparently some people think that when you have a locomotive that’s going nowhere it’s a good idea to throw the engineer into the furnace.

That’s pretty much what happened today. Mr. ‘I Fondle Coal Lovingly’ Korolec, the Environment Minister of Poland, will now be referred to in the past tense. He was unceremoniously sacked in the middle of the UN climate conference which he helped organize. Well, there was slight ceremony; the Prime Minister of Poland held a press conference in which he said, “I sacked the Environment Minister. This is the new guy,” while fondling a lump of coal he keeps handy for special occasions.

The new guy’s first words as Environment Minister of Poland were essentially that he planned on fracking Poland so hard the whole country would break apart like crackers under a hydraulic hammer. Here, in the conference center, if you listened really closely, you could hear the sound of synapses misfiring throughout the building.

You may have heard of the G7, G8 and G20? Let me introduce you to the G77; the group of small island nations who have had to adopt wearing hip-waders as part of their traditional attire. They’re here to negotiate the terms of ‘loss and damage’. It’s a hot topic in a hot world (har har). The idea is that, if they – despite taking the best available steps to keep it from happening – suddenly find themselves under six feet of water, they can ask for money from a central fund.  Essentially, it’s insurance on their insurance, using the basic calculation that burning fossil fuels leads to climate change and climate change leads to a lot of people standing around with toilet water up to their necks. Following on this, if they are victims of the developed world’s politicians crack-whoring to the fossil fuel industry, they may as well get some cash out of the deal.

Naturally, the crack whores are less than eager to pay if they’re not getting any crack out of it. So at six this morning, after negotiating for more than twelve hours, the G77 got up, gave the crack whores whatever their version of the finger is, and walked out of the building.

Frankly, when you consider that they’re only seeking compensation after bad weather breaches their first lines of defense, I think all 77 of them showed quite a bit of restraint. If I was with 77 people that were annoyed at the same thing I was, I’d seriously consider forming a mob to pelt the developed countries’ delegations with wet objects we’d found around our homes.

Today the bathrooms were packed with men in suits who had just shit themselves. The reason: China announced that it was “seriously preparing ground for its post-2020 mitigation contribution.” In plain English, this means that they’re trying to make a plan to help out the G77 when things get shitty. I’m not sure why this caused such a stir for a few reasons: One is that currently parts of China are so shrouded in polluted smog, cases of mistaken identity run amok. Paying the damages when chunks of that smog float over and roost on Taiwan seems fairly reasonable. Another is that ‘preparing ground’ sounds suspiciously like one of those overly used non-committals, wrapped in tentativeness, coated in fairy-dust sentences you hear a lot of. In fact, most of the stuff that’s said around here is so slippery you need a javelin to pin it down.

But, I guess in light of countries like Australia and Canada – so called ‘Annex 1’ because they are developed, produce pollution, can apply a carbon tax and should pay into the loss and damage fund – congratulating each other like retarded frat boys for giving a grand 'fuck you!' to carbon taxes and small Islands, and the EU’s pathological commitment to stumbling into itself, China’s ‘preparing ground’ sounds delicious.

COP19 part V: The little UN thing that could

The night they drove old Dixie down,
and the bells were ringing.
The night they drove old Dixie down,
and all the people were singing.
They went, "La, la, la"

 –  The Band, 1969

It’s a  tricky thing to confuse boredom with hopelessness on the human face, yet I seem to be doing exactly that. The other possibility is that, with the endless meetings, side-meetings, plenary sessions, focus groups, negotiations, closed groups and open groups,  combined with the generally stationary nature of anything that happens here, it’s hard to avoid feeling a bit of both column ‘a’ and column ‘b’.

I haven't seen it in too many other places, until recently. It’s the same look of boredom and hopelessness I’ve seen in pictures of the faces of 30 of my friends and colleagues. And they’re all in prison in Russia.

Here in Warsaw, at COP19, I’m starting to see it in the room where all the NGOs meet to discuss what the NGOs are going to do about the wrong-way-up-the-escalator style of getting things done around here. Generally NGO people are pretty chipper, "let’s go get ‘em!," shiny people, so the relative mood today was a stark contrast to the beginning of the conference. It didn’t change the fact that, after whatever it was that needed to be decided got decided, the NGOs would just do whatever they wanted anyway. No matter how much everyone in the room wants to save the world, you can’t help but think your way of doing it makes the most sense. And what is standard nom de guerre splashed across all NGOs by the outside world, becomes competing notches on a bedpost within the NGO community.

Anyway, the NGO meetings themselves remind you of the high-school classes where nobody bothered bringing their assignments in. The assignment in this case being to take notes and share their accrued knowledge with the rest of the class.

There are hundreds of wildly interesting sessions running at the same time throughout the Stadion Narodowy, where COP19 is happening. Michael Bay explosion-engorged blockbusters like “Consultation under the authority of the President on programme” and “Credible policies to achieve climate targets cost effectively and [sic],” which makes you wonder what the “Incredible Policies” session would be like, and where the rest of the title of the session went.

The expectation is that you return to the grand NGO meeting with your notes from one of these sessions. The thing is, nobody does. So what you get is a guy plaintively going down the list of sessions saying, “Did anybody attend the negotiation on gender-based mitigation of high grade model I jet streamed impacts on planetoid structures?... Anyone?... Anyone?... Hokay then... Did anyone go to the Dubious rendering of splatter graphs illustrating the two pronged approach of tidal incomings?... Yes?... No?... Alrighty then… Are you sure?... come on guys. Did anyone…” and on, with increasingly awkward pauses, and the general feeling of being an extra on Ferris Beuller's Day Off.

Hilariously, I thought, but nobody else seemed to – someone actually had a very loud recording of a cricket which they played during the long silence after one of the moderator’s hopeful request.

“All right, who did that?” said the moderator. “Please don’t do that.”

That nobody else laughed, I feel, is a testament to the boredom/hopelessness that hung thick in the room.

The NGOs, apparently, weren’t alone in their despondency. I was speaking to a member of the delegation of a small European country. He said, “The mood is bad around here, man. The people don’t feel any hope. They are lethargic and tired.”

I asked him if it was this bad, this early, last year. He said, “Ehm, no.”

Strangely, I may have stumbled on the cure today: Go stand in a booth.

The organization I work for has a booth set up at the conference alongside several other booths from several other NGOs. It’s meant to be unmanned, but because I got kicked out of the press room for having the wrong badge I went there to sit and try to get work done.

Whether it be carnivals, high-school science shows, or muffin stands, there’s something about being in a booth that makes people want to stop and talk pleasantly to you. First they come and look around at the briefs and reports you have on display, then they tentatively start to engage you. People talked to me about my organization, people talked to me about climate change, people talked to me about their booths, people talked to me about the conference, people talked to me about their family, their hopes and the country they are from.

Our booth had buttons to give away for our extremely high-profile war with a Russian oil giant which left a bunch of friends and colleagues in a Murmansk prison. Whenever I felt like not enough people were visiting the booth, which didn’t happen often, I’d scatter a few buttons around and people would come and cluster around like pigeons. The people at COP19 like free stuff.

My thinking is that if I offered a button to anybody that got anything done policy-wise here, there will never be another COP again.

Incongruously, or maybe not, considering all the twisted things involved in making this climate summit a reality, there was a booth a little ways down which was dedicated to climate skepticism. I’m not sure if the guy was serious, or he just liked being spat on.

Even the coal-obsessed, Donald Tusk, Prime Minister of Poland, who’s address I watched today, said climate change is a reality. At least, I think that’s what he said. The guy doing simultaneous translation in my headphones sounded like he was just making shit up – doubling back on himself and switching the word “can’t” with “can” and “reality” with “abstract”.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also delivered a speech, and I’m pretty sure he pulled a fast one on his Polish hosts. During the long ubiquitous platitudes directed at the amazing Polish country and it’s amazing Polish leadership, I distinctly heard him say, “I recognize the Polish government's strong commitment for climate change.”

He’s not a native English speaker, but he's been at this game for a while and knows what he's doing. I wouldn’t put it past him. Later on, he said that he visited Iceland and was shocked at how rapidly the glaciers there were melting. Then he said he was afraid that when he returned in a few year's time the place would just be called “Land.”

Ha.

COP19 part IIII: The little UN thing that could

Imagine you’re trying to disarm a bomb in the basement of the fully occupied high-rise you live in (if you need to add dramatic music, sweaty foreheads and a beeping digital clock, please do so).

The clock is ticking down. There are five of you – each with a specific task to contribute, each with a special skill which is needed to successfully keep the entire block from being turned into meaty rubble.

Now, imagine that one of you suddenly says, “I think I’m going to go back to my apartment and finish the bomb I’ve been working on,” and walks off to the elevator.

And then another person says, “That reminds me, I haven’t cleaned up after last night’s explosion at my place. Would you believe? There’s radioactive debris everywhere,” and heads off to follow the first guy.

Depending on your attitude about life, my guess is your feelings would range from miffed to spit-flying apoplexy. 

That’s pretty much what Australia and Japan did today. Australia, whose newly elected Prime Minister Tony Abbott said, “The climate change argument is absolute crap,” in reference to the fact that Australia was so totally on fire you could see smoke rising up from the back of his jacket. And Japan, where Tepco – the Stimpy to Prime Minster Abe’s Ren – has managed to turn the entire country into the opening credits of The Simpsons.

If you’ve read my previous entry, you’d know how volatile and fragile things are around here as it is. Not only is the decision-making process totally convoluted and counter-intuitive inside the building, but the COP19 itself appears to be built on solid layer of cheap irony. Alstom, for example, has built 95% all the coal power plants in Poland. ArcelorMittal is the world’s largest mining company. When you consider that the UN climate negotiations here in Warsaw are about reducing the amount of turd-coloured air we breathe, I find it weird that they are proudly displayed as the top two partners of this summit. This, to me, is like the KKK sponsoring a race-relations convention.

Then, you have the Polish ‘Environment Minister’ who is so into coal it could be considered a fetish. He claims that the coal he plans on producing will be done in an ecologically friendly way. The fact is, though, if you have shoes made of dog shit, wiping your feet a couple times on the doormat won’t change much.

So, what we have here is a global summit about reducing carbon emissions to avoid mankind ending up in cockroach fairy tales. It is in a country whose government likes to gnaw on coal for dessert. It is brought to you by the very people who would be pin-cushioned if any emission reduction is passed. And it’s all rendered silly by a screaming-mob-style negotiation technique. 

This house of cards appears to be built in monsoon season, and the knock-on effect of Japan and Australia backing out of their commitments may send the bomb disarmament team scurrying back to their homes. Directly above the explosive they built. 

The lack of defibrillators around here, I feel, will be seen as an oversight.

COP19 part III: The little UN thing that could

“It is the 19^th COP, Mr. President, but we might as well stop counting, because my country refuses to accept that a COP30 or a COP40 will be needed to solve climate change.”

--Yeb Sano, Head of Philippines Delegation. 11/11/13

There are people that spend their lives devoted to the next COP. They have read all the briefs, reports addendums and statements put out by national and international institutions which have been stripped down to their bare acronyms.

They speak legalese, politicese and consider reading things like, “In accordance with the “Guidelines for the preparation of national communications by Parties included in Annex I to the Convention, Part II: UNFCCC reporting guidelines on national communications”, at a minimum Parties shall report a ‘with measures’ scenario, and may report ‘without measures’ and ‘with additional measures’ scenarios. If a Party chooses to report ‘without measures’ and/or ‘with additional measures’ scenarios they are to use tables 6(b) and/or 6(c), respectively,” a perfectly acceptable way to pass time.

I am not one of these people.

The result is that I never have any idea what anyone is talking about. I recently watched two of my colleagues have a conversation with so many numbers, acronyms and referrals to obscure briefs I started to feel my brain slide down my gullet. That’s when one of them broke off and said to me, “You know, I often have to have someone there to explain to me what’s going on.”

If he doesn’t know what people are talking about, where does that leave me? Post-lobotomy comes to mind.

The halls, galleries, salons and auditoriums are filled with these people. At least, everywhere except the press room. This is where most of us spend our days; either hammering away at a keyboard, staring blankly into the middle distance, or curled in the foetal position under our desks.

Admittedly, I haven’t actually visited a plenary session yet. I’ve only watched them on the large TV in the press room. This alone has firmed my intention to get steaming drunk before I actually do. However, I have asked around for the inside scoop on these things. This is the way a plenary session appears to work:

Anywhere from five to 500 people all sit in an auditorium facing a raised platform. They are the delegates; chosen by their respective country to represent their country’s interest. They have been chosen, not only because they own a suit, but because they have achieved high marks in their respective country’s Stubborn Nitpickers Test. Upon the raised platform are other people in suits who moderate. There are about eight of them. Everyone is there to come to a decision about something.

Are you starting to see a problem here?

Mere mortals, like you and me – and as long as you are NON-GOVERNMENTAL, PRESS or PARTY (see here) – are allowed to attend the open session. This is the time when they “discuss”, let’s say, a proposal made by Brazil (a developed country) about how much cash they’d give to Micronesia (a developing country) if all the islands were sucked into a sinkhole due to ocean-floor mining for minerals. The answer, by the way, would be: None.

After a long introduction by the lead moderator, he offers the floor to anyone who wants to comment on the proposal. Inevitably and unfortunately, someone always does. But before they get into the actual comment they must, by some unspoken agreement, give a long, and often Oscar-worthy thanks to everyone in the room, the organizers, the country they’re in and their home country. If they are following-up on someone else’s comment there is a diplomatic, deeply heartfelt thanks to the previous delegate’s contribution before they proceed to eviscerate them with the same zest as a hyena with an antelope carcass:

“I respect the cherished, esteemed, well-adjusted and highly intelligent delegate from Thailand’s comment concerning the fact that he too comes from a small island with the same challenges, such as being entirely submerged by a tidal-wave, but he is a worthless piece of toilet slime who knows nothing and should be immediately removed from the room for stealing my oxygen.”

When they finally do get around to the actual comment it’s usually some nitpicky stuff about the use of the term “clean water” instead of “potable water” or “life-raft” instead of “life-boat”.

All five to 500 people get to do this, or comment on someone else’s nitpickyness with nitpickyness of their own. Or do both. This is probably why they need so many moderators; five to hold the delegate down, two to pry their mouth open and the last to hold their tongue still.

Whenever someone comments, the image I have in my mind is of throwing a Mexican jumping bean into a packed chicken coup.

After this goes on for a while, the moderators kick everyone out of the room who doesn't have a lanyard with a badge saying “PARTY” hanging from it. Naturally, I have no idea what goes on at this point. I do know that whatever it is, it can go until the wee hours of the morning. Maybe this is when the actual PARTY activates.

It could be just me, but 500 people packed in a room, at three a.m., after nine hours of discussion, with entirely different agendas, trying to work out the details of a single sentence, doesn't really sound like an ideal decision-making process...

COP19 part II: The little UN thing that could

Security is tight here at COP19. The kind of tight you’d get in any European airport – belt off, shoes off, jacket and change into the big tupperware dish on the conveyor belt. It’s not as tight as the cavity searches you get in US airports, and it’s not tight enough to keep the bullshit out.

In fairness though, they did manage to keep some of it out. Directly outside of the circus tent that is the Stadion Narodowy they’ve got an electric car in a big plastic box. It’s pretty much the only symbol that the COP19 might have anything to do with promoting clean energy. The car runs on volts, but as a colleague pointed out, so does the entire country of Poland. 90% of Poland’s electrical grid is powered by coal, the dirtiest of the dirties. This makes that electric car the first ever family sedan which runs mostly on coal power.

Ironies come cheap around here, but this one seems to have escaped everyone’s notice.

The branding of COP19 is hard and fierce around the Stadion, but virtually non-existent anywhere else in the city, and particularly lacking in the airport. In fact, every time I’ve been in an airport there has been some kind of indication of something – anything – happening in the place the airport is in – from the Junior Hockey championships in Ottawa, to Honouring People with Oddly Shaped Heads in Cape Verdi. Here, where they are hosting an international climate summit? Nada.

Not that the branding was thought out with very much imagination anyway. Some words saying that this summit brought to you by ‘COP19’ blah, blah. ‘UN’ is in there somewhere, too. Then, in trendy scrawled writing, what seemed to be: ‘I Cate’. I spent about two minutes wondering who Cate was before I got a closer look and realized it said, ‘I Care’.

They give you badges to indicate who you are here. It’s partly so that people know who to ignore, and partly so the staff know who you are in case you do something weird like laugh, or pee in the paper recycle bin. The badges come in three colours. The press get green ones which say, ‘PRESS’, the NGOs get yellow ones which say, ‘NON-GOVERNMENTAL’, and weirdly, the policy mavens get ones which say, ‘PARTY’.

Not only did it give the impression that the policy-makers were having a good time, but I had to resist the urge to give them two thumbs up and say, “Hell, yeah,” when I passed them.

I stood in a silent vigil this morning with a bunch of other NGOs. A long line of us positioned ourselves along the entrance corridor to the stadium proper. We all either had pictures of the Arctic 30, or signs telling people to take a lead from the 30 and get their shit together. People gawked, news agencies showed up, photographers and videographers showed up. Diplomats looked on. Some smirked, some didn’t. Some people didn’t know what we were doing, others gave a us a raised-fist salute.

But right in the final minutes of the hour-long vigil, a small figure went by. His hand was on his heart and he gave us each a nod of thanks as he passed along the long line of silent protestors. It was Yeb Sano, the head of Philippines delegation. The guy who gave the only speech worth listening to on the first day of the summit – pleading with the world to not let his islands and people drown. I held a few different signs for the hour I was there, but at that moment I was at the end of the long line holding a sign which said, “Do you have their courage?” I made eye-contact with Sano for a split second, and I deflated like a balloon. This would be the third day of his fast to try to get policy-makers to get moving on mitigating climate change.

In that moment, I thought to myself, “Christ, he must be so hungry right now.”

COP19 part I: The little UN thing that could

On the way to the Stadion Narodowy – the national stadium in Warsaw hosting the COP 19 UN Climate Talks – I pointed out to a colleague that the building looked like the cup part of a cupcake. She said it looked like a circus tent.

From a metaphorical point of view, she’s mostly right. The spectacle element is definitely there. You have an audience raptly caught up in the chattering of overly-dressed Masters of Ceremony. You have the thrill of listening to high-wire phrases like, “You know very well that no-one expects us all contribute the same level of effort in this quest for better tomorrow [SIC],” and, “We are all aware of the role of the Kyoto Protocol in the mitigation effects deployed by parties listed in Annex I and the importance of maintaining the continuity of the mitigation procedures adopted by those parties.”

The circus animals would be the beleaguered whipped journalists. They are forced to walk circles around a stadium the size of a large city block, hoping to get statements from officials which carry slightly more meaning than the types of things you get from athletes: “We played hard and we’ll continue to play hard and keep up the offence and try to keep it in the zone and maybe stop climate change. Thanks Bob.”

It’s worth noting that the journalists, the most reliable source for the rest of the world to know what’s going on, are kept in a room which is so far away from where anything is actually happening, they may as well be in Gdansk.

I asked another colleague if the other COPs were like this – with the great distance between the press and the plenary rooms. She said, “Yes.”

I said, “Okay, next time we’re all bringing bicycles.”

And like most circuses, or any place with a captive audience, you even have ridiculously overpriced ‘sandwiches’ which contain nothing but a leaf of lettuce.

With head of the UNFCCC, Christiana Figueres, considering speaking at a concurrently running ‘Coal Summit’ in Warsaw, and the hastily pulled blog post by Polish COP 19 organizers which said a melting arctic is an opportunity to “save time and energy” – it seems the circus might have bled out onto the streets.

Frankly, considering the fact that a ‘Coal summit’ is even allowed to happen during COP19, or that certified morons are organizing the thing in the first place, suggest the Polish Government is inhaling its own fumes.

The circus metaphor pretty much ends there, though.

You see, at a circus, even if it’s a clown shot out of a cannon, things actually get done. Right now, listening to long droning platitudes as everyone thanks everyone else for showing up, and for being in Poland, and for being themselves, and for being themselves while in Poland, the whole thing strikes me as going nowhere.

This is largely because everybody is pretty much saying the same thing: Something bad is happening to the planet, something needs to be done, that something needs a plan, but first we need to plan how we’re going to plan that something. Let’s all agree to plan to make a plan to deal with that something.

Truth is, the only person that said anything worth listening to was the head of Philippines delegation. You see, his brother is pulling bodies out of the rubble after a mega-Typhoon (“mega” being the new addition to anything which is, apparently, not bad enough) turned vast parts of his island into wet debris. He’s pretty sure that climate change is the cause of it. And he’s pretty sure the people making plans to make a plan about something are complicit by sitting around squabbling about minutia and personal responsibility.

Granted, it is early days. Something long and sausage-shaped may come out of all of this glad-handing and platitude-wielding. Who knows, maybe they’ll fire a delegate out of a cannon up into the coal-choked Warsaw sky.

Maybe, but I doubt it.