Day 9: Time’s running out …
Unbelievable. It seems that the most exciting thing to happen at Copenhagen so far is the arrival of Californian governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. That’s if you judge popularity by the length of queues … and the queue to get the “first come, first served” tickets to his talk today was several times longer even than the queues to the loos, the coffee bars and the food stalls.
So yes, it seems a lot of people wanted to hear what the good governor had to say.
Suppose he has been head of the world’s sixth largest economy (was it the sixth?) for a while—but then, Forbes magazine also lists him as one of the five possible reasons for that very economy’s collapse during the past year.
Whatever the case, there were more important things to do at the Bella Center in Copenhagen today than queue for the honour of listening to Schwarzenegger’s political rhetoric. The world’s environment ministers have arrived in town and spent the day going over the draft texts that their bureaucrats spent the past week picking over… the same text that was supposed to become the two-tiered legally binding agreement, by midnight this Friday, that is supposed to save us from runaway global warming.
I’ll be bold enough to predict one thing, and hope for another: I don’t believe a legal agreement will happen this Friday. There are too many gridlocks on “non-negotiable issues” this late in play.
Secondly, I hope the current text doesn’t because law because it’s so weak on hard emissions cuts, deforestation efforts, and financial assistance for the “global south” that if we signed it, our kids would really be stuck with uncontrollable climate change.
So everyone’s hoping that ministers—and then state leaders, who arrive on Thursday—will get more ambitious.
I doubt it’ll happen.
But in spite of the gloomy mood hanging over negotiations (as the press room swelled to capacity with the influx of mostly new US media arrivals), it was lovely to walk back home from the station this evening with snowflakes swirling around my head. It was a gentle counterpoint to the otherwise sweltering political and scientific topic of global warming.
Leonie Joubert is a science writer, reporting for Independent Newspapers from the United Nations climate negotiations taking place in Copenhagen from 7 to 18 December. This is her blog-on-the-side.