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.