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.