Of course, the reality of climate change takes no notice of our capacity to deny our predicament. As ably covered by Gareth over at Hot Topic, the latest reports say there is little hope now of keeping the global average temperature from rising beyond the agreed target of 2 degrees. The likelihood of a 3 degree increase now looks to be 50%.

So it’s a more complicated world we now ponder. International climate change campaigner and founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben, has written a book about this place called Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. I haven’t seen it here yet, but my local library says they will have it soon. In the meantime, the book, McKibben, 350.org and related issues are discussed here by Rebecca Solnit and it’s an interesting read.  Eaarth begins:

For the last ten thousand years that constitute human civilization, we’ve existed in the sweetest of sweet spots. The temperature has barely budged; globally averaged, it’s swung in the narrowest of ranges, between fifty-eight and sixty degrees Fahrenheit. That’s warm enough that the ice sheets retreated from the centers of our continents so we could grow grain, but cold enough that mountain glaciers provided drinking and irrigation water to those plains and valleys year round; it was the ‘correct’ temperature for the marvelous diverse planet that seems right to us. And every aspect of our civilization reflects that particular world.

We built our great cities next to seas that have remained tame and level, or at altitudes high enough that disease-bearing mosquitoes could not over-winter. We refined the farming that has swelled our numbers to take full advantage of that predictable heat and rainfall; our rice and corn and wheat can’t imagine another earth either. Occasionally, in one place or another, there’s an abrupt departure from the norm — a hurricane, a drought, a freeze. But our very language reflects their rarity: freak storms, disturbances.

Bill then describes how it’s all changing

A NASA study in December 2008 found that warming [of more than a degree and a half Fahrenheit] was enough to trigger a 45 percent increase in thunder-clouds that can rise five miles above the sea, generating ‘super-cells’ with torrents of rain and hail. In fact, total global rainfall is now increasing 1.5 percent a decade. Larger storms over land now create more lightning; every degree Celsius brings about 6 percent more lightning, according to the climate scientist Amanda Staudt. In just one day in June 2008, lightning sparked 1,700 different fires across California, burning a million acres and setting a new state record. These blazes burned on the new earth, not the old one… In August 2009, scientists reported that lightning strikes in the Arctic had increased twenty-fold, igniting some of the first tundra fires ever observed.

According to the [National Sea Ice Data Center] center’s Mark Serrenze, the new data ‘is reinforcing the notion that the Arctic ice is in its death spiral.

Rebecca Solnit continues

Then he mentions that a trillion tons of Greenland’s ice melted between 2003 and 2008, a mass ten times the size of Manhattan. Someone recently pointed out that the term moving at a “glacial pace” makes no sense any more, not now that Greenland’s ice sheet is pitted and undercut by rushing torrents of meltwater and the glacial landscape of mountaintops from the Andes to the Rockies is changing with almost blinding speed…

The early part of Eaarth offers the grim news about the way one species, ours, remade our world — so radically that it has become a turbulent, surprisingly inhospitable new planet. And here’s the bad news: no matter what we do, it will continue to get worse, at least for a while, though how much worse depends on whether we act.

We have entered a new realm, dear reader, one where not only do we need to fight for meaningful reductions in emissions to limit the damage as much as possible, but where we must now also adapt to a climate that will be increasingly volatile. Our governments have failed to provide necessary leadership, thinking they can play politics as usual indefinitely, rather than face reality. This will only make the day of reckoning harder when it comes, and as Bill is telling us, it is coming.

But despite this depressing message, Rebecca says MiKibben is not entirely pessimistic.

Fortunately, the second half of McKibben’s book offers a kind of redemption and a lot to do, and so gives the book the shape of a “V,” if not for victory, then for viability: you tumble into the pit of bad news, then clamber up the narrative of possibility — of what our responses should look like, could look like, must look like. This is where this particular book diverges from the mountains of recent publications on the facts around climate change: if the first half is a science jeremiad, the second half is a very practical handbook…

His vision is kind of delicious, at least if you like participatory democracy, local power, community, real security, and good food. Okay, it requires renunciation — but of things a lot of us would love to give up, including the whole alienated mode in which both power and production are centralized in remote and politically inaccessible sites — from food produced overseas to decisions made in furtive board meetings of multinational corporations. These things are awful for a lot of reasons, but the salient one is that they’re part of the carbon-intensive conventional economy. So they have to go.

Eaarth is actually an exceedingly polite, understated cry for revolution, but one that makes it clear how differently we need to do a whole lot of basic things. If it’s all about how you tell the story, then McKibben tells one that hasn’t, until now, been associated with climate change, one in which life, in ways that really matter, gets better. And it’s a winner, maybe even a game-changer…

A lot of people don’t even want to take in the reality of climate change, let alone do anything about it, because it seems so overwhelming. Eaarth’s most significant strength lies in the way it breaks our potential response to climate change’s enormity down into actions and possible changes that not only seem viable and graspable, but alluring…

Thanks Bill and Rebecca. Sounds like a must read.

Perhaps I am still learning this game, so I shall look for guidance, from anyone except the One Who Spoke, over the reply given by the Prime Minister to Jeanette Fitzsimons on her last day in the House.  We’d welcome comment from readers, too.  It is, after all, you whose gaze remains unclouded by the mist that arises from the witticisms in the House during Question Time.

It all has to do with Copenhagen.  There a Youth Delegation, composed of 12 young Kiwi adults, sought a meeting with the PM to listen to him expound his views on the future of climate change for our country and his Government’s policies to combat the threat.  Their letter seeking an appointment is here.

Granted, the Prime Minister is a busy person and Copenhagen was a critically important conference.  And the Youth Delegation was composed of people who were, well, young.   All of those factors go to ensure that, actually, he should have met with them.  But he did not. At least, that is what they told us, on returning to New Zealand.

In her last Question Time two weeks ago, Jeanette asked the Prime Minister a series of questions pertaining to climate change.  Wrapping up, she asked him why he had refused to meet with the Youth Delegation in Copenhagen. 

The PM blandly replied that he had met with them.  He wondered where Jeanette had got her information.

In politics, credibility is everything.  This exchange was a relatively minor matter in the greater scheme of things, although the symbolism of meeting with the youth at Copenhagen would not have been lost on anyone except, it seems, the PM himself.  So it is worth exploring a bit further.  No doubt the PM judged he could get away with hitting Jeanette’s question for six into the Gallery, at some cost to her own credibility as she exits the place (despite his tribute to her in the first reply).  But things have a habit of coming back to bight.

The Youth Delegation, in response to the exchange in the House, felt moved to send a letter to us.   It is unequivocally clear that the PM did not agree to hold a meeting with the Delegation, but by chance happened to interact with two of the group when they were seeking to elicit an answer to their letter. 

Does this matter?  Yes, it does.  This kind of thing goes to the heart of politics.  Political fault lies less in getting it wrong than in misleading the public. 

The PM would have known, during the exchange, that he had not had a proper meeting with the Delegation.  So be it.  He could have said that he was sorry he’d been unable to meet them, that it was just not possible to squeeze it in.  He could have undertaken to meet them at some future time.  He could have even decried the merit of such a meeting – asserting that he had higher affairs of state to attend to over the next 18 months.  We might decry such a balance of priorities, but at least there would be genuine debate.

But he did none of these.  In full flight, he took refuge, as he is increasingly prone to do, in the smart reply.  Wrong-foot the opposition and move on fast.  That may, or may not, have worked in currency trading.  It does not work – for long – in politics.

The Prime Minister, fresh from the Letterman show, is slipping from grace.  He is in the illustrious company of ‘misspeak’.  Bill Clinton, fronting up to the grand jury during the Lewinsky affair, pondered the meaning of the word ‘is’.

Hilary Clinton, in the heat of the ’08 presidential campaign, explained that she had misspoken about ‘running with our heads down’ from sniper fire on landing in Bosnia during the crisis there in the ‘90s.  Each survived, politically, but with reputation seriously tarnished.   Tony Blair is facing comparable tests in the British enquiry into the Iraq war. 

John Key, we Kiwis believe, is a likeable bloke and that’s the way he wants it.  Even on that puerile level of analysis, he needs to apologise to the Youth Delegation.  Twitter gets around.  On the more serious level of the credibility and the mana of our head of government, he should apologise to the New Zealand public, in the House of Representatives. 

I came ‘home’ early the other night – at 11.30 p.m.  I sidled to the bathroom for my nocturnal peripheral pass by her bedroom.  The light was on under her door.   I hesitated, and moved on.   This would have been our first ‘face-to-face’.  And there are limits.  I went to my bed.

We tried to meet.  We e-mailed each other.  I advanced a proposition.  Thursday and Friday, I said, would be marginally freer since the MPs, members of GLOBE, would not be at the conference site but meeting in town, following proceedings live-streamed.  Wonderful, she shot back.  How exciting!  It will be like Xmas, she will actually get to meet her house-guest.

The excitement was shared.

Friday morning came.  A tough one.  I had been following the plenary into Thursday night, waiting for speeches from the US and China, and later, New Zealand.  Proceedings were tracking 3 hours late and due to wind up at 5.00 a.m. Now it was heading for 1.00 a.m. and speakers were getting a bit turgid.  When the US and China inexplicably did not appear in the queue for their speeches, and New Zealand would not be till after 3.00, I call it quits and plunge outside into the cold, knowing that the metro for my last leg is already closed.  I would stay, but I have a 30-hour flight coming up soon.

So, Friday morning, I am downtown and meet up with Jeanette and Rick.  We meet with other Greens – from Ireland and also the Canadian leader.  That is 11.00 a.m. to 1.00 p.m.

I am to meet Therese at 1.15 p.m.  We are to meet in the foyer of the Plaza Hotel.  It is a splendidly elegant old hotel close to Kobenhavns H station.  The foyer has thick carpet and dark wood surroundings, with a hushed atmosphere and pleasant efficient reception staff.  It is not what I have become used to in my Copenhagen week, which has been considerably more austere.  But I know it because I had occasion to meet a colleague there and it was close to the station.  It would be an upbeat ambience to meet Therese.  And there is an elegant café that is adjacent to the foyer and part of the hotel.

It is important to be elegant for Therese.  I select my light blue tie for aging elegance, and plunge, yet again, into the cold.  It is, I learn, minus 9 Celsius.  Fine.

It is approaching midday and we Greens are ensconced in Green-talk.  My blackberry hums.  A new message, one of the hundred or so I get each day, has arrived.  It is wise to read them immediately.  It is from Therese.  Dear Ken, it says.  I have just gotten the news that a very close friend of mine has been fired.  Therefore I unfortunately have to cancel today’s lunch with you.  See you at home, hopefully before you leave.

I send a reply.  Therese, que sera, sera.

I doubt I shall see Therese.  Not this time.  Not at the Copenhagen Climate Conference of 2009.  Perhaps, perhaps not.  Anyway, as she would say, ha, ha, ha.

Bye Therese.  Thanks for everything.

Even before the farce in Copenhagen began it was looking like it might be too late to prevent two or more degrees of global warming. The nation states, pursuing their own interests, have each been passing the parcel of responsibility since they decided to take action in 1992. We have now lost 17 precious years, possibly the only years in which climate breakdown could have been prevented. This has not happened by accident: it is the result of a systematic campaign of sabotage by certain states, driven and promoted by the energy industries. This idiocy has been aided and abetted by the nations characterised, until now, as the good guys: those that have made firm commitments, only to invalidate them with loopholes, false accounting and outsourcing. In all cases immediate self-interest has trumped the long-term welfare of humankind. Corporate profits and political expediency have proved more urgent considerations than either the natural world or human civilisation. Our political systems are incapable of discharging the main function of government: to protect us from each other.

Goodbye Africa, goodbye south Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral reefs and rainforest. It was nice knowing you. Not that we really cared. The governments which moved so swiftly to save the banks have bickered and filibustered while the biosphere burns.

Enough said really, but you can read the rest here.

The purpose of the meeting was to agree on a second commitment period for the Kyoto  protocol. That has not been achieved.

We came here wanting an ambitious, fair and binding agreement. The talks have failed on all three counts. There are no country targets, only an appendix where countries offer non-binding reductions which collectively will not stop warming of two degrees. As it is not ambitious or binding, it cannot be fair to the developing countries that are already suffering from climate change.

There is not even an aspirational statement about reaching a stronger agreement next year.

It is a disgrace that New Zealand was the first country in this group of outlaws to accept the travesty and walk away from the post Kyoto UN process. They have dashed the hopes of millions of people around the world and let all New Zealanders down.

Thirteen million people signed a petition in the last few days calling for strong action. They will not be denied. Civil society has made its presence felt in Copenhagen and will not give up.

Signing off from Copenhagen.

Jeanette and Kennedy

They worked out at the start how fast they all had to run to make it. They set targets for how close they would be in five years. But people didn’t run that fast. Some walkied, some said “I will pay others to run faster so I don’t have to”. Others sat down for a rest. Still others wandered backwards because they didn’t believe the disaster was really coming.

At the end of the five years they discussed again how fast they had to run to catch the train which had  now disappeared over the horizon. If they had all run at the speed they agreed five years ago they would now be much closer to the train.They argued. “You sat down for a rest, so you have to run much faster now”. “No, I can only start from where I am. I will run a little faster than I have been and that should be good enough.”

And so their running targets all changed, to reflect the fact that they had only walked or sat down. A few caught up with the train but they couldn’t get on because the others were far behind.

If parties had met the targets in the Kyoto Protocol the reduction we need now for developed countries wouldn’t be 25-40%, but 20-35%. Instead, countries like NZ have to undo the 23% emissions increase since 1990 before they can count any reduction. Canada, the most recalcitrant of the developed countries had a bright idea – let’s measure our next targets against 2006 emissions. That gave the US the chance to say “We will reduce by 17%”- which is only 3% below 1990. But the climate doesn’t reset the clock at each COP. And the train has disappeared over the horizon.

Plenary has broken for lunch.  The ALBA group is holding a press conference.  The leaders of the Latin American ‘radicals’ – Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador – are speaking.  They mix a global cry of despair with traditional anti-gringo rhetoric.  I am able to discount the latter – I had two decades of Cold War experience in doing it.  The global socialist state is not the answer to climate change, any more than the global Caliphate or the global boardroom

The cry of despair, however, is new, and compellingly authentic.  I do not regard the US as imperial the way ALBA might, but I do concur that the US-led North disproportionately shares responsibility for the ‘failure’ that is Copenhagen.  If we in the North refuse to acknowledge historical responsibility for emissions, if we refuse to meet the UN’s prescribed targets, if we insist, perversely, that the South put their numbers on the table with vice-like ‘measurement, reporting and verification’ before we move further, and if we display an incomprehensibly callous indifference to the plight of our Polynesian cousins – how in God’s name can we expect to lead in a legitimate global bargain?  I just do not believe it.

This is not the moment for negative partisan politics.  What I have to say is more underlying, more fundamental.  In addressing the challenge that is climate change, and the temporary ‘failure’ that is Copenhagen, I declare greater political support to the leaders of ALBA than to the Prime Minister of New Zealand.  I remain loyal to New Zealand – to the constitutional apparatus that is the Crown.  But I believe that the ALBA leaders are correct in what they say, and that the Government of New Zealand is wrong, profoundly wrong, in what it says and does.  ALBA is the voice of the Earth, the voice of humanity.  New Zealand, in its current official form, is the voice of indifference, of vested interest, of fatal procrastination.  I am less ashamed than incensed.

The ‘blame-game’ industry will get a new lease-on-life in the New Year.  The Danish leadership has been trenchantly criticised – both for its organizational shortcomings and, far more importantly, for its hapless strategic misjudgements in the negotiations.  But those shortcomings could have been overcome.  Failure derives from the underlying faults in the structural and political configuration of the international community.  Too many nations.  Too much national self-interest.  Too much political obduracy.

Forgive us, Lord, for we knew not what we were doing.

It is not the end of the world – yet.  We have six to twelve months to achieve what we have failed to achieve here this week.  Copenhagen is the shrill wake-up call to humanity.  To squeeze through the eye of the needle, we shall need to mobilise a global chorus of political demand straight from the citizens everywhere.  Fragments of that – intermittent snatches of the haunting hymn that can be humanity’s single harmonious voice – have been heard already.  But it is nothing compared to the swelling chorus that will be heard over the coming months – before, through and after Xmas.

And we need extraordinary global leadership.  From whom is it to come?  To whom are we to turn, in our time of need?  The national leaders have come.  They have dined, and talked off the record.  That has proven insufficient to the task. The UN Secretary-General has just requested them to stay overnight.  We trust they are all up to such extraordinary self-sacrifice.  But they seem more in personal national defensive mode than in proactive global leadership mode.  One of them needs to break out.  Is it Obama?  What of the UN Secretary-General himself?  He says the right things, pretty much.  But will they follow him?  Unlikely.  He lacks the constitutional empowerment.

At the Law School in Canterbury University, I teach a course entitled ‘Global Constitutionalism’.  Ban Ki-moon lacks the constitutional empowerment to lead humanity.  Read Hammarskjöld’s remarkably prescient philosophy back in the mid-20^th century.  History, now, yet speaking to us today – 18 December 2009, in Copenhagen.

As I sign off on this, we have returned to the High-Level Segment in plenary.  It is the turn of the International Youth delegation.  They are on stage.  The young man says to the leaders – “You should be ashamed”.  His voice breaks.  “Please, please, do it now”.   The 17-year-old young woman from the Solomon Islands had earlier said – “I was born in 1992.  You have been negotiating all my life.  Finish your work.”

This is the voice of the young – echoing around the planet, out into space, following in the wake of Voyagers I and II – carrying the tremulous sounds of a species at risk

Our “home base” at the Bella centre – until, like other NGOs and parliamentarians and research organisations we were kicked out, has been a small white table with associated power points  for computers and phones, in the main hall.  Our near neighbours were the Rainforest Coalition, groups who have been working on  REDD, the initiative to fund developing countries to preserve  their rainforests from the logging and burning that is decimating them at present. It’s a big ask, as in most developing countries more than half of the logging is illegal: theft by foreign corporations against the local law and with no return to the country that owns the forests.

We’ve been able to glean the inside story on the negotiations from the folk at the next table, including my old friend Peg Putt, former leader of the Tasmanian Greens, and now working for an Australian rainforest NGO. It was great to see her again.

At the Barcelona meeting the EU succeeded in taking out of the main text the protection of  the rights of the indigenous peoples who  live in and depend on those forests, and inserting the ability  to replace the  old growth forests with palm oil plantations and still qualify for  subsidy. There has been a huge  amount of work by the NGOs to protect biodiversity and indigenous rights and they have been restored in the text.

There is still the issue of how the finance will be managed – at national level or regionally. Some are concerned that corruption at government level may prevent the money reaching the people it is designed to help. Others say dealing with a plethora of local officials  could be even worse. It does raise the need for better governance in many nations if it is going to be possible to implement a global climate agreement.

Of all the climate disasters unfolding daily, the huge loss of tropical old growth forests is the most irreversible. It is not just  about carbon,  but about soil,water, species and ecosystems which may exist  nowhere else. That’s why even a small victory is important.

Jeanette discusses the lack of emissions reduction targets thusfar offered by rich nations, and the $100 billion pledge from the US that will begin in 2020 to assist developing countries mitigate and adapt to climate change. 

Kennedy tells us what he believes will cause these talks to fail, if indeed they do, and suggests the way to avoid this fate is to adjourn for six months to allow more time for a legally binding treaty to be negotiated.

And what will President Obama say, if anything, in the next few hours to avoid catastrophe?

How much more confident I would feel that NZ was truly offering to play a responsible role as a world citizen if these two headed up, or were even part of, the NZ delegation!

One of my favourite authors on economic and environmental issues is Bill McKibben. He is in Copenhagen too and writes compellingly about the disaster of conceiving of the Copenhagen conference as just another international meeting to address a political issue. He’s writing about the US of course, but his words are equally applicable to New Zealand.

Radio NZ News this morning carried a grab from John Key’s national statement to the conference, in which he called on other nations to show “leadership” in taking action on climate change. That one word sent me into a fit of rage. Key heads up a Government with a simple strategy. It’s one that will be familiar to, say, readers of “The Hollow Men” (or those who have seen Alistair Barry’s brilliant film version). There is a narrow range of issues on which the Government is definitive, and from which, in fact, it cannot be swayed. Typically these are the issues driven by the doctrinaire ‘minimal state’ position of its financial backers or those arising from a ‘politics of nostalgia’ (hat tip Paul Spoonley) feeding the desire of their baby-boomer supporters for a return to the comfort and certainty of the NZ of their youth. On every other issue the Government’s approach is to avoid taking a position if it can (leave it to “consumer choice”, for example) or to adopt the most centrist line they can find.

Taking a firm stand on an issue runs a high risk of alienating those who disagree, but National’s approach innoculates itself against this risk. A significant group may not like the approach, but very few will hate it. It should be noted that Labour is no stranger to this “find the middle” approach either – indeed the contest between the two sometimes seems like a struggle to alienate the fewest voters.

National’s overall approach has been to take the temperature of the New Zealand electorate, take a clear direction on those issues it knows to be broadly popular, and bob along somewhere in the middle – avoiding taking a position whenever it can – on everything else.

It’s a great formula for winning an election but it’s an unforgiveable failure when it comes to climate change. Leaving it up to individual action and consumer choice simply won’t cut it. What is instead required is leadership. That involves leaving behind the comfort of disengagement. The Government knows that if the worst effects of climate change are to be averted, then bold and ambitious action is required now. New Zealanders will respond positively to it.

Which is why my stomach turned this morning to hear John Key use the word. As usual on climate change, he calls on others to do what his Government refuses to do itself.

For 8 days the conference has ground along in true diplomatic style, officials parsing words and bracketing phrases within the mindless straitjacket of 193 inflexible cabinet decisions thrashed out in advance of what purports to be multilateral negotiations.  Behind the screens, leaders are talking.  But not necessarily agreeing.

Now we are at the public High-Level Segment, today and tomorrow.  As I write, President Sarkozy is speaking.  Failure, he says, is not an option.  This is not, he says, a symposium on climate change – it is the moment for decision.  There are less than 24 hours left.  He urges leaders to take decisive action and he means it. Others agree.  Great. Must be time for action.

This has been a unique conference.  Although it is not over and although we do not yet know the outcome, I believe we can see the future through the veil.  Or, to switch the metaphor, humanity is peering through the eye of the needle, sizing up our chances of squeezing through.  Into the deliverance of global unity.  That includes the rich, who are in the business of recomposing themselves.

I have attended major UN conferences before – disarmament in ’88, Rio in ’92, Cairo’s Population Conference in ’94, and others.  This is different in kind.  Those conferences, governments were negotiating on behalf of nation-states.  This one, governments are negotiating on behalf of humanity.  In 2009, virtually all humans see climate change as a personal threat – to themselves and their mortal posterity.  We’d rather not condemn our descendants to Hell.  They might resent it – and remember who we were.

Nuclear weapons were the first global threat.  Einstein and others cried out for global change.  Yet the bean-counting could naturally be confined to the nation-state, so after the failed Baruch Plan the weapons stayed within our own arsenals.  But you can’t condense the global carbon atmospheric concentration inside the national cake-tin.  The global commons is shared.  We all breathe the same air.  We feel the same heat.

So the global civil society has kicked into action in an unprecedented manner and to unprecedented effect.  That does not, in itself, determine decisions – or lack thereof.  But it does influence the broader dynamics in a way that has national leaders running – for present cover or future office.  Global justice is no longer a prescriptive moral vision; it is a condition of survival.

And at the conference the political imagery is different from Rio.  That conference, I remember only one national leader referring to Earth in a cosmic context and he was regarded as barking mad.  This morning, one compares Earth with Mars and suggests we choose Earth.   Others talk of the beautiful pearl in space.  One calls for a global referendum on five questions that would logically lead leaders to a singular decision-point.  Outside the assembly hall the British Prime Minister appeals to humans the world over to sign a global petition to pressure leaders.  Leaders appealing to be pressured.  That is where we have come to.  So the philosophical context is different.  It is, as they say, a ‘paradigm shift’.  And that is an historic advance.  Equal to Apollo 8’s ‘Earthrise’ back in ’68.

So why do we not get agreement?   Because of a second truth.  Our 19^th century conference machinery is inadequate for 21^st century problems.  If humanity faces truly global problems today, and we do, then the principle of subsidiarity, accepted by nation-states in a regional context, requires certain limited global decision-making power at the global level.  Instead, we have 193 sovereign entities, bickering in tribal fashion over misperceived national interests.  New Zealand is one of the worst offenders.  And we have the simian gall to rail at Tuvalu for their intemperate behaviour – emotionally appealing for survival.

Humanity’s technological advance has outstripped its political evolution.  Our institutional structures, resting as always on underlying political assumptions and premises, remain national.  They are not even truly regional.

We can contemplate four alternative scenarios post-Copenhagen.

• We can, miracle of miracles, reach genuine agreement, legally-binding and reflecting national self-abnegation, collectively meeting the prescribed global targets, based on informed scientific evidence.  Chances?  5%.
• We can, miracle of miracles, refashion our decision-making at the national-regional-global levels that avoids the dysfunctionality of the traditional conference machinery, and emerge with a global solution of a genuine, legitimate kind.  Chances?  10%.
• We can fail to act with sufficient resolve and capability, and watch the UN Security Council adopt binding enforcement powers under Chapter VII in response to increasing international instability.  Legislate for climate change, the way it has for terrorism.  Alarmist?  In April 2007, the Council held a debate on climate change and its security implications.  The Pacific Islands Forum urged the Council to be prepared to act.  Presumably, that included New Zealand.  But China implacably opposed even a joint statement.  Then in June this year the General Assembly expressed concern over the adverse impacts of climate change, including sea-level rise, and the possible security implications this could have.  It urged the Security Council to return to the issue and asked the Secretary-General to report back.  So don’t write it off.  Chances?  40%.
• Or, we can wallow in the mire, continuing to fight one another for competitive national advantage, grabbing deck-chairs for the best positions on the Titanic.  Literally observing the icebergs as the boat goes down.  Chances?  No comment.  See if we can deny the maths.  See if we can thwart the Devil.

Copenhagen cannot be a ‘success’.  Barring a miracle (0.001%), there will be no numbers.  But ‘failure’ can be avoided.  This requires a strong statement of political agreement, and a decision to adjourn rather than close.  The conference would re-open within six months for a legally-binding treaty reflecting agreed obligations by both North and South in the global interest.  Six months.

Anything less is a failure.  And failure is not an option, for the President of France.  Nor for my grand-daughters.  Mia is 5.  Khali is 3.  Mala is 2.  Oshani is 3 months.  Four cute girls, very vulnerable.

Better get our act together.

Therese is one of a syndicate of Danish hosts who have signed up to billet conference participants from outside Denmark.  Jeanette and Rick have separate hosts.  The difference is, they have met theirs.  I have not met mine.  Five days and five nights together without ever meeting.  It is a surreal arrangement but it has become surprisingly normal.

Therese offered some months back and we set up the arrangement.  I made direct email contact with her just before my departure for Denmark last week.  She wrote back.  “Anyone who fights climate change is welcome in my home”, she said simply.  I immediately looked forward to meeting her.

I headed off for Copenhagen on Air New Zealand.  In Hong Kong airport I checked my email.  This was just as well since Therese had made a late-minute change to the arrangements.  She was attending her annual Xmas Party the Friday night I was arriving.  She would leave the key for her apartment at the Left Luggage counter at Copenhagen Airport.  An unusual arrangement, I thought, perhaps normal in Nordic culture, though three years in Sweden had not bolstered my experience for this.  I was beginning to like Therese.

Sure enough, the Danish official at Left Luggage cheerfully handed over the envelope in my name.  Don’t you want to check my identity, I said, incredulously, offering my passport?.  No, no, he said in clear and clipped Danelish.  We trust you.  I felt humbled.  I was beginning to like all Danes.

I take a train, and then a metro, then I track down her apartment on the street.  It is close to midnight, cold and dark and unfamiliar.  The apartment is the standard, brick, semi-detached tenement building bordering right on the street.  Moment of truth.  The outside door-key works.  I reach the top floor and the same key allows me inside.  I am home.  There is a welcome note from Therese.  She will be home around 3.30 a.m.  I creep in, use the shower, and flop into what is presume is my bed in what I presume is my bedroom.  This proves to be perfect judgement.  At 4.00 am, I hear what I take to be Therese climbing the stairs and passing my bedroom.

Saturday morning I am up and off at 6.30 a.m.  Unsurprisingly, no stirring from Therese’s bedroom.  I e-mail her from the conference.  She emails back.  Welcome she says.  She will out that night at a second Xmas Party.  Do not expect her back early.  I am back at midnight – to an empty apartment.  But it has been made warm by a wood-burner and a light is left on for good cheer.

From Friday to Thursday today, I have left in the dark around 7.00 a.m. and returned in the dark around midnight.  It is not a routine guaranteed to meet Therese.   I email her.  This is from your phantom guest, I say.  It is proving difficult to meet up.  Perhaps breakfast next Saturday morning before I fly out to New Zealand?

She replies by email.  It says: “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha”.  Perhaps.  Perhaps not. Perhaps before.

I believe I k now Therese very well – better than many delegates I have shaken hands with and exchanged professional comment at Bella Conference Centre.  I know her habits.  I know her reading material.  I know what she looks like, since there are photos of her – at least I think it is her – on my bedroom wall.  There are quite personal notes to her posted up, which, given she knows I am coming and leaves them up, I presume I am free to read, though I feel a pang of prurient guilt nonetheless.  They make her out as an unusually creative, pleasant and carefree young woman.

I hope I meet Therese.

They also serve, who pass like ships in the night.

Here is one I found:

Looks like things are heating up.

George Monbiot continues to speak bluntly of the reality humanity faces in this article on the Copenhagen climate summit. I was sorely tempted to post the whole thing as I did recently with another here, but instead a few excerpts and I encourage you to read the rest:

This is the moment at which we turn and face ourselves. Here, in the plastic corridors and crowded stalls, among impenetrable texts and withering procedures, humankind decides what it is and what it will become. It chooses whether to continue living as it has done, until it must make a wasteland of its home, or to stop and redefine itself. This is about much more than climate change. This is about us.   …

This is a meeting about chemicals: the greenhouse gases insulating the atmosphere. But it is also a battle between two world views. The angry men who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their self-fulfilment, have understood this better than we have. A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially by environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have granted the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For a moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful mindlessness.  …

Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments and those who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands.  …

Although the delegates are waking up to the scale of their responsibility, I still believe they will sell us out. Everyone wants his last adventure. Hardly anyone among the official parties can accept the implications of living within our means, of living with tomorrow in mind. There will, they tell themselves, always be another frontier, another means to escape our constraints, to dump our dissatisfactions on other places and other people. Hanging over everything discussed here is the theme that dare not speak its name, always present but never mentioned. Economic growth is the magic formula which allows our conflicts to remain unresolved.  …

But somehow this first great global battle between expanders and restrainers must be won and then the battles that lie beyond it – rising consumption, corporate power, economic growth – must begin. If governments don’t show some resolve on climate change, the expanders will seize on the restrainers’ weakness. They will attack – using the same tactics of denial, obfuscation and appeals to self-interest – the other measures that protect people from each other, or which prevent the world’s ecosystems from being destroyed. There is no end to this fight, no line these people will not cross. They too are aware that this a battle to redefine humanity, and they wish to redefine it as a species even more rapacious than it is today.

It really is time to wake up.

Denmark is a wonderful country.  We all love the Danes, and for good reason.  They are unassuming and whimsical.  And they think ahead.  You will know about their carbon neutral island, Samsǿ.  They have made all public transport – superb as it is – free for all delegates in Copenhagen.  Organic food is the default inside the Centre.  A modern wind turbine spins out a lazy cosmic message behind the conference site.  Momentarily direct your thoughtful gaze out the window, and it caresses your mind.

And, as I travel along the metro to Bella Centre, the dawn breaking red to the east, you look into three giant smokestacks, belching tonnes of coal-smoke into a distraught atmosphere, the billows catching the crimson rays from the ultimate source of renewable energy we should be harvesting.  It’s a metaphor for humanity.  A Biblical sign.  Change your ways, O Israel, or prepare for exile.

The 15,000 of us inside the Centre are all very busy.  Most of us are devoted to trying to make sense of the pace of change – or non-change.  It is not easy.  There are probably 100 who will decide the fate of the Earth.  The other 14,900 are beavering away, making a contribution as best we can.  Yet it is critically important we are here.

That way, the NZ Youth Delegation can attend the NZ ministerial reception at the NZ Consulate and present their sail to Minister Groser.  There is a pregnant pause and he responds.  The words are honeyed but the body language pierces the outer perimeter of the comfort zone.  Minister Smith beams avuncularly.  He claps lightly.  He, too, was young once.  Simon Upton, former ministerial colleague fresh from leading the Kyoto delegation twelve years ago, claps long and loud.  What does this mean?  We need a Kremlinologist.  But one thing is clear. Ministers are between a rock and a hard place.  Yet that is right where they should be. The Youth have had their say.  Their beautiful white sail lies at the ministerial feet on the floor of the NZ Consulate in Denmark, bearing its antipodean message of plight and plea from thousands of young Kiwis.

Now, they wish to meet with the Prime Minister.  I hope our Leader agrees.  If he does, the Youth will give him ‘what-for’, because they are not cowed by pomp-and-ceremony the way our generation was, and because they are terrified of the future.  They see things we do not see.  So the Prime Minister cannot really refuse.  He is between a rock and a hard place.  Right where he should be.  Not because of his Government’s failing policy.  Because he is their Prime Minister and this challenge is not political, it is existential.

And us erstwhile opposition MPs – what are we to be doing?  We are following closely and intently.  We are judging the substance of the NZ policy and attempting the complex task of calibrating it within the twists and turns of the negotiations within the global context to determine a fair share.  At least Jeanette and I are.  We understand that Labour’s Charles Chauvel failed to get entry.  We met him once off-site.  Have not seen him in the precincts.

What more can we do?  Can we make a statement?  No, at least not in the official forum.  Jeanette is on a high-level parliamentarian panel, theoretically with Connie Hedegaard, Gro Harlem Brundtland, and other luminaries.  It is a fitting tribute to her global status as an environmentalist – largely unrecognised back home.  Something about prophets.  I introduced her the other day to a group as the ‘conscience of the nation’.  She embarrasses easily.  I think it comes with the territory – something about mana.

So can I make a statement?  No.  Only Jeanette has that outlet here.  But I did try back home.  I work in the NZ House of Representatives.  It is a debating chamber.  Only last week, just before coming, Jeanette sought an Urgent Debate on climate change.  An international scientific study had just appeared making it clear that current targets by the overdeveloped countries would result in a much higher temperature rise than 2°C.  This, we thought, might place the good work the NZ Cabinet had done in judging its 2020 and 2050 targets in a new light.  It would, after all, not be enough.  At least, this would be debateable.  So we wrote to the Speaker.

According to the Standing Orders, the Speaker gets to decide on an Urgent Debate alone.  He rises to his feet – I think Dr Smith (not to be confused with the other Dr. Smith) is a good Speaker.  What does he have to say?  “There is no ministerial responsibility for the results of the [German] study.”  And anyway, “the continuing issue – the accumulation of evidence concerning the setting of emission reduction targets – cannot give rise to a debate under Standing Order 380.”  There being ‘no particular case of recent occurrence’, the application is declined.

So, we cannot debate the latest twist in this Nordic saga – that the planet is heating up more than worst-case scenarios had judged likely – because it is an ongoing issue.  Nothing new under the Sun, so to speak.

Jeanette and I had prepared for the Debate.  You have to, even though you are not sure if it will go ahead.  My draft languishes in the hard drive.  This happens.

But here it is.  Call it a ‘Scream into the Void’ – (091209 Urgent Debate – Final )-echoing around the planet, catching up with me on the other side of the planet and with my 15,000 colleagues all around me right now, and with the other 30,000 milling disconsolately in the streets of Copenhagen – and for that matter the 6.7 billion of us dwelling on this fragile speck of dust.

Have mercy upon us, have mercy upon us.

The European Parliament cross-party forum on population and development held a “discussion lunch” yesterday to look at the relationship between population policies and the challenge of climate change. Family planning activists from many organisations around the world listened to three presentations then compared views over lunch.

Family planning is focused on the hundreds of millions of women who would prefer to have fewer children if they had access to family planning. While the prediction of 9.2 billion people by 2050 is scary when one thinks of food supply, this is just the central prediction, based on the assumption that current resources for family planning programmes will continue. That is no longer a valid assumption. Resources have been shifted out of programmes into other important initiatives like Aids prevention because governments love announcing new generous programmes and avoid telling people it is not new money, but recycled from somewhere else. The fear is that climate change adaptation finance will also rob these programmes.

Then there are the perverse drivers. There is climate change adaptation aid available in the Maldives. It is very short of land but some islands have  less than 500 people and so don’t qualify for help to build a sea wall. So families have more children in order to get to the population that will qualify for government programmes.

The man from Ethiopia spoke last at our table. The average land available for a whole family to feed itself in large parts of his country is 0.25 ha. Two million more people are expected to join that population in the next few years. He thinks it’s too late to leave it to individual choice.

Jeanette and I are at the Copenhagen Conference as part of GLOBE – Global Legislators for a Balanced Environment.  Today (Tuesday) I was part of a delegation meeting with IBRD President Robert Zoellick.  If you are unaware of Mr Zoellick’s career, it might be worth looking it up. 

I was in a group of MPs from seven ‘countries’ – UK, Germany, China, Japan, Brazil, New Zealand, and the EU.  Mr Zoellick rolled in with 13 officials in tow. 

We opened in a free and frank manner with all guns blazing.  We wanted to convey the concern felt by MPs in the developing countries over World Bank policies.  Was he aware of that concern and if so, what did he propose in order to redress it?  The president played to his audience.  He had been going to great lengths, he said, to increase the role of national legislators in developing countries – strengthen their institutional capacity to speak for the people.  He hoped that GLOBE could support him in that goal.

On climate change, our Japanese colleague asked him whether he was aware of the extraordinary imbalance in historical emissions between North and South – over the past 250 years the US had emitted 30%, China 7.8%.  Should this be a factor in the Copenhagen negotiations?  No, said the president of the World Bank: “if you assign guilt, you will dangerously narrow the scope for concord and fail to emerge with an agreement on Friday”. 

We were too polite to point out that the LCA draft still before delegations states that the ‘ambitious long-term goal’ for emission reductions should be agreed, “taking into account historical responsibilities and an equitable share in the atmospheric space”.  It’s not even bracketed.

Finally, I asked if we could go back to first principles for a moment.  I said that when I had been at the Earth Summit in Rio in ’92, there had been an almost palpable despair over the lack of scientific capability for understanding the relationship between humans and the planet – the burgeoning population, expanding lifestyles and the global carrying capacity.  Agenda 21 had called for new concepts to measure our impact on the planet.   Since then, there had been much progress over sustainability indicators.

-          The Ecological Footprint, the GPI and other new concepts had been developed

-          The Sarkozy Commission this year had captured much of this within the goal of ‘rethinking our economic models’. 

-          The British Sustainability Commission had commissioned Prof. Tim Jackson who had emerged with his ground-breaking ‘Prosperity without Growth’. 

I asked Mr Zoellick for his personal opinion on whether humanity could prosper without the driver of economic growth. 

The World Bank President responded with a succinct comment.  “Tell it to the developing world.”  People on $2 a day still needed economic growth.  Perhaps, I replied, but what about the rich North?  There are poor people in the rich countries, he continued without a misstep. 

So, it’s ‘trickle down’ still at the World Bank.  And we all sloped off separately to dinner.

With a population similar  to greater Auckland, although covering much less space, it has a new (2002) metro that is very  fast and I’ve never had to wait more than 4 minutes even though I’m near the end of the line. It is comfortable, quiet, clean and people use it  to capacity. It doesn’t cover the whole city, but does of course go to the airport and connects well with the older surface train system  and the buses.  Changing lines is no trouble.  Denmark has  excelled in planning for the visitors -  electronic signs that tell you  how long to the next train also tell you which one delegates to COP 15 should take.

And the whole system is free to delegates which saves the hassle of working out what ticket to buy and how to buy it.

There are cycle lanes along all the roads, between road and footpath. Not a good place to  stand and get your bearings – there are so many cyclists using them you’d be knocked down in 30 seconds.

It all seems so sensible and straight forward – why is it so desperately hard to get decent transport systems in NZ?

Oh, I forgot – motorways are so much more important.

Some highlights of the video below:

• Many bike lanes are double laned
• Special blinking lights on the road so turning traffic know that bikes are coming
• Traffic lights that are synced for vehicles travelling at 20kph

For me, the big takeaway from this is that if you make biking a respected and serious part of your city’s urban planning, people will use it, in droves. Even in very cold countries!

hat tip: TreeHugger

If the cup is half full, you conclude that the preliminary negotiations in Week 1 have been fruitful and that national leaders are bound to thrash out the remaining differences and emerge smiling on 18 December with a politically-binding agreement that will translate into legal obligations during 2010 in time to avert disaster.

If it is half empty, you harbour a profound disbelief that, after a quarter-century of recognition of the climate change threat, 17 years after the Framework Convention, 12 years after the Kyoto Protocol was signed, and 2 years after the Copenhagen negotiating process commenced, we are still bickering over the length of the 2^nd commitment period, and what legal form the next agreement will take – all this with four days before the conference terminates.

Set aside the critical substantive issues – what proportion of global emissions we must agree for 2020 and 2050, when emission should peak, what (higher) cuts the rich North must accept, what degree of curbing from business-as-usual the impoverished South can be asked to accept, whether we bless the inundation of Tuvalu or undertake a last-minute effort to avoid that, how much funding the North must fork out for minimum global equity to lubricate the ‘grand global bargain’, how much we can responsibly rely on technological breakthroughs to trump Armageddon.  Basically, change humanity.  Set all these minor challenges aside.  Just focus on the simple procedure – should the next commitment period be six years or eight?  Can we get agreement?  Nope.  Too much fund grandstanding and hectoring, settling accumulated diplomatic grudges.

Monday morning, the Kyoto Protocol stream of the negotiations fell into disarray when the South sought to block the North from what they feared could be an abuse of the future provisions governing land use and forestry that would give the North a free pass out of having to drastically cut their emissions.  So the North retaliated by ending discussion on ‘mitigation targets’ – the cuts by the North themselves.  The meeting adjourned early –an inauspicious start to the Critical Week of the Greatest Show on Earth. By midday the Chair has indicated that things were back on the rails and would resume in the afternoon.  Half full, by diktat.

The global mind is being concentrated this week.  It is Reckoning Time for humans on Earth – five millennia of human striving, four centuries of European political thought, three centuries of Euro-American economic dominance – not to say exploitation.  The failure of the international community over the past half-century to rectify the obscene inequality among peoples on the planet, and to restore over the past quarter-century the health of the planet itself.  It’s call-in time.  The South have had it, and they are not about to genuflect any further.  They will not sacrifice themselves, even to save the planet, so long as the rich nations of the North remain crimped.  And so it goes.  It is up to the North to genuflect – first time ever.

Today, “the Danish President invites Parties to open-ended informal consultations to address major issues requiring political guidance.”  Parties will be invited to seek solutions on the following issues:

1. Long-term emission reductions goal ;
2. Aspects of developed country mitigation under the Kyoto Protocol, comprising:

(a)     Aggregate and individual levels of emission reductions

(b)     How to ensure consistency in how targets are met;

1. Aspects of developing country mitigation under the Long-term Cooperation Agreement, comprising:

(a)     How to record planned mitigation actions

(b)     How to consider implemented mitigation actions

1. The role of market-based approaches in achieving mitigation
2. Ensuring predictable, long-term public financing for adaptation and mitigation, beyond short-term financial commitments
3. Other Issues:

(a)     Trade issues arising from mitigation policies

(b)     Situation of developed country Parties with special national circumstances

(c)     International aviation and marine bunker fuels.

All this by Friday.

Pray for us.