by Nick Bellorini
18. December 2009 10:52
It’s started to snow on the sorry rainbow nation of ‘NGO’s without badges’, as they shuffle slowly toward their 8 hour-distant goal of registration as ‘Observers’ to the 15th Conference of the Parties. The Danish army are busily handing out a very welcome coffee (or something approximating coffee), but despite the gallows humour that ripples around, it’s a pretty unremittingly bleak scene, set against the backdrop of the cold clouds and the horribly misnamed Bella Centre, which has all the charm of Slough Trading Estate. I get a text message from my colleague a couple of hours behind me in the queue: ‘This better be the greatest show on Earth’. Right.
This is to be the defining episode of the 3 day visit, for this bearer of witness at least. The awareness of the magnitude and consequence of the discussions taking place just a few meters the other side of the barriers juxtaposed with the feeling that your presence has about as much human value – for your own objectives, let alone to the machinations of the COP – as waiting in line at the Boxing Day sales. The word from the conference is that the negotiations are falling apart. The mood is gloomy (‘Hopenhagen – b****cks’, a distinguished Earthscan author puts it over dinner the night before) and the frustration is palpable. What’s going to change the play? I overhear an OECD economist extolling the virtues of nuclear power. Great.
Meanwhile, a short metro ride away the soap boxes are out at the Klima Forum and its buzzing with the hum of ideas and ingenuity (I have to take others words for this, of course). Elsewhere in the city, the Climate Action Network are preparing their assault on the Bella Centre to reclaim the negotiations for the people, planned for the following day.
Back in Slough, standing in line and focused on ‘getting the badge’ and the now obligatory secondary pass (since access is being rationed), one begins to reflect uneasily on whether in fact we are missing the point, the value and the meaning, of this whole event.
Undoubtedly then the highpoint – away from the queues – was on the Monday and the chance to hear the diminutive climate rock star, President-activist Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives. The clarity and directness of his remarks on the key deliverables for the most vulnerable nations, are a timely and powerful reminder of the yawning chasm that exists between those for whom climate change is essentially a debate about economics and those for whom it is an imminent existential threat. What prospect of a fusion of those horizons?
Wednesday, ironically, is a breeze getting in. It’s the last day that the mass of NGO delegates can attend the Bella Centre. If reports are to be believed, this thinning out of the circus of observers coincides with the point at which the negotiations begin to loosen, and pathways to some sort of agreement begin to emerge. So, we might as well have not been watching. But then this is the quantum indeterminate universe of the United Nations ....
And was it the greatest show on Earth? Well, at the time of writing, we wait and see.
