Blog Action Day Climate Change - The view from Copenhagen
How do things look on the frontline on Blog Action Day? Copenhagen is clear and cold - no global warming apparent today - and in some confusion, if I am honest.
Denmark's Chief Negotiator resigned at the weekend and its media have since been having a field-day speculating about, and digging into, the - undeniably regrettable - story. As an outsider, albeit a deeply engaged one, I conclude that you just have to shrug and accept that things are as they are and that nobody ever really knows until afterwards what the impact of such events may be. (In my line of business people are often desperate to be posted to country x, and only resigned to their failure to get there when a year later they acknowledge that, had they gone to x, they would never have ended up in heavenly y).
Another confusion is to do with how on earth COP15 is actually going to run. Who should turn up when? If I want a speaking slot on such and such a day, who do I ask? What do the Danes decide and what the UN? When does the High Level Segment begin, anyway? Behind all of this is acute anxiety amongst my Ambassadorial colleagues about hotel rooms. As for us - we have a No10 recce party arriving soon and they will want some hard facts. Today we have few, but soon we shall have more; the man from the Ministry tells me that there is a meeting in Bonn today at which much of this will be worked through.
Finally, there is the small matter of 'will there be a deal?'. Again, confusion reigns, stimulated by media reporting which naturally sustains itself by representing first one view and then another as the experts' best guess. Very often we in Copenhagen feel like theatre-goers watching Racine, conscious that the big deal-shaping decisions, like his plot-determining deaths, all happen off-stage: 'Sire, the new Japanese premier has committed to cutting his emissions by 80% by 2050' And so on.
I've always known that diplomats need to be able to tolerate high levels of uncertainty. Here we're all now putting ourselves to that test.
Posted at 15:35 15 October 2009 by Nick Archer | Comments[0]
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