The Copenhagen 'Roundup'

So I arrived home today after my two-days short trip to Copenhagen to visit the UNFCCC talks. Even though I have only stayed there for two days it was an incredibly rich experience. There was really everything in Copenhagen, from multinational NGO events communicating a real 'one world feeling' to massive, green-washing PR-campaigns of large multinational companies. I will write a short series on my experiences in Copenhagen over the next few days, trying to reflect the diversity of what is going on in Copenhagen these days. De facto the Climate Change Talks are split up in three, more or less separate, parts: the official talks in Copenhagen's Bella Center, where only accredited government representatives and civil society organizations may enter, the Klimaforum, an alternative civil society summit with NGO representatives from all over the world, and an exhibition area in the town center that is mainly (but not exclusively) used by companies and businesses to present their would-be green image.

When I arrived on Monday morning in Copenhagen after a ten hour trip in the night train from Frankfurt, I went directly to Bella Center for registration. The travel was stopped short at Orestad, one metro station south of Bella Center. We had to go on walking since the metro could only be used by people who had already registered. When we approached Bella Center by foot we soon saw that things would not be as easy as anticipated: there was already a queue of roughly half a mile of diplomats, NGO representatives and delegates waiting to register at Bella Center. In the beginning things were still interesting. We met a lot of people from different NGOs and from different backgrounds in the queue and time was going by quickly. Later people from the Asian web-tv "supreme master tv" started to distribute "vegan starter packages", calling attention to the masses of CO2 that are produced by cattle breeding (even though they were exaggerating the figures grotesquely, claiming that 90% of global emissions stem from cattle breeding). Some activists were disguised as chickens or elks, my personal favorite was the shrimp girl in a pink full-body shrimp suit, complete with antennae and red cheeks.

After three hours waiting in the cold I started to put on extra layers of clothes. Progress was VERY slow, but the queue was moving. I didn't have any  feeling in my toes anymore, but I really wanted to get inside, so I stayed. After three and a half hours there was absolutely no movement in the queue anymore, but I could finally see the entrance. Some people were slowly getting angry, chanting 'let us in' and 'shame on you'. But there was still a big screen TV on which I could watch the 'climate change report' from India or the 'Fossil of the Day' award for the hundredth time, so somehow we carried on.

During all this time there was absolutely no information from part of the UNFCCC secretariat or the Danish hosts. All the people standing in the line for hours had received a preliminary accreditation and were encouraged by the UNFCCC secretariat to start planning their travels to Copenhagen. Some people were standing around in mini-skirts for hours at temperatures below 0°C, others had traditional African or Arabian clothes, clearly not prepared for the long wait in the freezing cold.

After waiting five hours in the cold there was an announcement that the organizers did not know how long registration for the waiting people would take, but that registration would close at 6 pm as planned. At that time it was 4 pm, the queue was still nearly half a mile long, some of the people waiting since 11 am (like me). Some minutes later people passed around a single sheet from the UNFCCC secretariat, stating that apart from Tuesday even less people would be let in. Additionally a system of limited 'secondary badges' was due to be introduced to limit the number of people accessing the conference grounds. On Friday, the most important day, only 90 NGO representatives will be allowed to enter.

To make the long story short: like thousands of other NGO representatives we have not seen Bella Center from the inside. We stayed the rest of our time at the civil society summit "Klimaforum". I was disappointed, but after all we had not put in as much work, time, money, effort and HOPE into our trip to Copenhagen as many NGOs and their representatives from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Some of these people have traveled for  thousands of miles and have paid a lot of money to make their voices and the voices of the principal victims of climate change heard. And the UNFCCC secretariat, the Danish hosts and the government parties are actively excluding these people. Their voices matter most, yet they will not be heard. Additionally many NGOs from poorer countries do not even have the money to stay for one or two weeks in Copenhagen. These NGOs are coming on the last days, because they were hoping for a maximum impact of their participation at the peak of the negotiations. These people will never gain access to the Bella Center. The 90 NGO representatives allowed in on Friday will probably be hand-picked and the secondary badges necessary to enter will have run out long ago.

This is the background of the demonstrations and the attempts to storm the Bella Center that we see on the news tonight. I went to Copenhagen because I was interested in gathering first hand experiences, because I was curious and because I wanted to witness international negotiations from up close. Today I am angry, frustrated and deeply disappointed of how the issue of climate change is handled at the expense of the poor and excluding the persons most concerned. 

And of course other people, who feel the impact of climate change in their everyday life, are even more angry and frustrated because they see that our leaders do nothing. They only debate meaningless figures of percentile emission reductions, referring to different base years, while the atmosphere does not care about base years and output reductions. What really matters is the total amount of CO2 in our atmosphere, percentile output reductions only buy time but do not solve the problem. Even if climate change is a phenomenon too complex for anyone to grasp in its entirety, people see that this game of numbers our leaders are playing is meaningless. And additionally our leaders exclude the people on the ground, the ones who really suffer from climate change. The heads of states in Bella Center are sure lucky that the majority of the victims of climate change is too poor to come to Copenhagen. The message to the heads of state is clear: step up to your responsibility and lead, or step aside and let people really willing to make a change do the job!