This isn’t the most immediate reaction to Copenhagen, but it was mostly written in direct reaction to the news coming out of the conclusion of the conference; it’s just taken a little while for me to have the time to post.

All throughout the Copenhagen Conference, I was trying to remind myself that a week or two before the whole thing started I answered a question in my economics class on whether anything seriously significant and actually useful would come from the Conference with a resolute “not a chance”. I was trying to remind myself of this to keep from getting my hopes up: Obamaesque rhetoric and the occasional positive news story from the Danish capital are too easy to grasp on when you think the need for a strong and binding agreement is as important as I think it is.

I’m glad I did this, because my conclusion after the leak of the ‘Danish text’ (though I can hardly claim the credit for this conclusion, I almost certainly copied it off some commentator in a newspaper or blog) that we’d mess around this time and procrastinate the decision to a comfortingly distant point—and one which naturally had nothing to do with four or five year electoral cycles—, seems to be fairly accurate. When I wrote the bulk of this post, I hadn’t had much time to digest the news from the COP15 (I was having an adventure by choosing the very best day to take the train from the Netherlands to Edinburgh), but I did see the following which I quote from the BBC News web-site,

“However, he added that the deal was not enough to prevent dangerous climate change in the future – but nonetheless was an important first move.”

Bali was the “important first move”; the EU’s Energy and Climate Package was preparatory legislation; Barcelona was the end stages of negotiation! Right now, all I can see is that when we finally get ‘round to having another set of negotiations for proper and legally-binding action to tackle climate change, we’ll come out of it saying that we have laid the groundwork for co-operation and further discussion.

If we talk because that is what is easy, then we are cowards.

I’m being cynical about human nature, but are we seriously going to wait until things get really bad before we even start to do anything to fix what is one of, if not the, biggest problem facing humanity right now? It’s almost enough to make me want to turn to revolutionary socialism just so that I have a political black hole to throw all my energy into; and anyone who knows me, knows that if something is driving me to the socialists, it must be getting to me a fair bit!

You know that you’re close to hurting powerful and not completely innocent interests when something that should otherwise be honest, scientific, and above board, takes on an air of sleaze. I am of course referring to the leaked emails I covered on this blog the other day, and the leaked draft ‘agreement’ from the Copenhagen Conference, aka the “Danish text”.

I had a read of the text (linked to below), and while I’m not certain where The Guardian got some of its claims from—clearly my abilities in reading international legal texts are not up to scratch, an especially fun thing to learn when I have a moot European Court of Justice on Friday—, the document is very far from what I would have hoped for from the Conference.

Dealing with just a couple of specific points: first, the document repeatedly uses the phrase, “poorest and most vulnerable countries”; what does this mean? It seems like either a recognition that those who will be hit hardest by climate change will be in the “poorest and most vulnerable countries”, and so deserve urgent and special assistance in their efforts at adaptation and mitigation; or alternatively, and rather more cynically, it could be a way for developed nations—foreseeing the inevitability of their assisting developing states—to keep the number of countries to which assistance must be afforded, to the bare minimum. Say I’m cynical about this if you want; I’ll explain why in my next post, though you can probably already guess.

The second thing I wanted to specifically pick out just now was the means by which this draft text came to light. The document wasn’t released into the open by its authors, it was leaked by someone. How can there be any form of trust between developed and developing nations at the Conference, if one side goes off to secretly write a draft text that it will try to force through with a smile from Obama and, no doubt, a generous helping of ‘diplomacy’ from all in “the circle of commitment” as The Guardian reports the authors are apparently called? As I recall the President of Brazil repeatedly stating in a report on climate change from sometime around 2004, and I paraphrase slightly here, “a tonne of carbon emitted in Bogota has the same impact as a tonne of carbon emitted in Chicago”. Yes, developed and developing countries will feel climate change in different ways, and both have different capacities for mitigation and adaptation; developed and developing countries have to meet as close to being equals as they can though: we’re all in this together.

I have a feeling I’ll be returning to the “Danish text” fairly soon.

Link to the Danish text

I had mixed feelings when I watched the opening of the Copenhagen conference—dramatically broadcast in a ‘we interrupt normal programming’ format on BBC World News, cutting off a Turkish diplomat mid-sentence on HARDtalk. With a lack of any desire for a legally binding treaty to replace Kyoto in 2012, it is tempting to write off Copenhagen as a load of hot-air, but I think it still might serve some purpose. If an agreement on the rôle of developed and developing states in tackling climate change can be reached, then at the very least, we will be on the right road, and ready to take more urgent action once a few countries cease to exist, and the harsher effects begin to be felt.

It’s something, albeit not much, that we are where we are now; we are, after all, trying to change a fundamental aspect of modern global society, and people rarely like change.

Despite my post suggesting a brief intermission on this blog only being posted last night, I figured out the solution to the problem with Safari 4 within about 10 minutes of hitting “Publish”, so the Thursday Briefing is back up and running.

The posts here have been a bit light lately thanks to a glut (correct word?) of essays being imminently due, but in the course of researching an essay on climate change, I came across the “Road to Copenhagen” web site. The basic premise is that ordinary citizens (though how many of them will find the site?) can have their say on a draft communiqué to be delivered to the Conference of the Parties at Copenhagen in December by editing it with a wiki. They’ve already done it for Bali and Poznań.

Aside from a slight doubt that this will be taken particularly seriously by the COP, it does seem like a marvellous idea. Giving people direct input into what are otherwise opaque and aloof negotiations must be one of the few ways that any sort of involvement and attachment can be formed for international entities which otherwise have only about 194 constituents to listen to.