17 December 2009
Less walk, more talk
A quick update of the situation in Copenhagen.
Friends of the Earth was barred from the talks yesterday – as now widely reported.
We walked peacefully out of the centre around 1pm after protracted negotiations with the UN to try to secure the places we’d been promised.
We were fuming at the excuses the head of the UN climate talks, Yvo De Boer, tried to give us in person as to why we weren’t allowed access to the talks yesterday, despite having all the required security passes.
All the NGOs today, including Friends of the Earth, are down to a handful of people each in the centre where the talks are taking place. But once again, of the four spaces we have been offered, already two of our staff have been denied access to the Bella Centre.
But our remaining two are hard at work supplying our team with the information they need - in the new nerve centre we’ve quickly improvised in a room close to the alternative, ‘people’s climate summit’, the Klimaforum, in the centre of town.
Our policy experts are analysing the latest developments remotely, so we can still influence the talks through commenting to the media and deciding what actions we need to take to pressurise politicians from the outside.
Reports are that the talks are still stalling. China has said this morning it doesn’t believe agreement can be reached – and that a vague statement by world leaders restating their commitment to tackling climate change will be most likely.
But Hilary Clinton has revealed this morning that the US supports plans for a climate fund of $100 billion per year by 2020 for developing countries, which suggests a shift in the American position.
As I’ve noted before, this sounds good at first glance – but she is merely voicing support for proposals already put forward by the EU that most of this money comes from recycled aid money and from carbon trading, not from governments themselves.
This won’t wash with developing countries, which is why the talks appear to have reached another stalemate – with rich countries doing all they can to paint them as the villains to cover their own failure to put anything approaching meaningful action on the table.
The talks have just a day remaining – but with the power to negotiate passed from civil servants to national leaders, there’s still a chance that a strong and fair agreement could be reached.
Henry Rummins
Henry Rummins is travelling to Copenhagen as part of Friends of the Earth’s delegation, and will report for Geographical on the UN climate talks happening there over the next two weeks – where the world will decide its response to climate change. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
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