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.