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Targeted demonstration: Protesters near the Canadian embassy in Copenhagen
By James Cracknell
As Rosanne returns home to the South-West following her weekend blitz of demonstrating and interviewing, I will be taking over her blog in the fashion of a relay runner taking on the final sprint for his team. May I first thank Rosanne and the Copenhagen 3 for all their hard work – great stuff!
So I’m here as a media campaigner, also with Oxfam, staying on until the last day of the summit. And there’s sure to be plenty of action to come as Gordon Brown arrives this morning as the first of the major world leaders to come here for the UN climate talks.
As much as I’d love to write all about what’s happening at the Bella Center, where the summit is taking place, I’m afraid I might bore you to death if I did (and that’s not even accounting for the fact that they won’t let me in there anyway). The UN climate talks are almost impossible to follow. The negotiators speak in a different language: it’s all REDD this, LULUCF that and CDM everything that isn’t nailed down.
Yet I remember from doing my GCSEs at Filton High School that climate change really needn’t be very complicated. In fact, you only really need to understand three things. The first is the greenhouse effect: certain gases trapping heat in our atmosphere, like carbon dioxide. The second is that humans have been burning carbon in huge quantities since pre-industrial times. And third, our Earth is warming: the decade about to end is the hottest ever recorded.
Hence, if you can put two and two together, and make four, understanding climate change needn’t be as complex as the UN negotiators are making it in Copenhagen. The solutions themselves, too, should be simple. Yet no-one in the Bella Center seems able to agree.
The most crucial week of the UN negotiations – the culmination of two years’ work – began yesterday with developing countries suspending their involvement.
Jeremy Hobbs, executive director of Oxfam International, said: “This is not about blocking the talks – it is about whether rich countries are ready to guarantee action on climate change and the survival of people in Africa and across the world.
“Australia and Japan are crying foul while blocking movement on legally binding emissions reductions for rich countries. This tit-for-tat approach is no way to deal with the climate crisis.”
There are many more developed countries blocking progress too. Despite agreeing to slash emissions by signing the Kyoto Protocol, Canada has increased its carbon output by 30%. The main reason is the Alberta tar sands – from which a particularly carbon-intensive type of oil is produced.
Because of this, about 100 people demonstrated outside the Canadian embassy in Copenhagen on Monday morning. While the Canadian government clearly sees the money to be made from the tar sands as more important than stopping catastrophic climate change, the residents of Alberta disagree. One who spoke at the demo was even moved to tears.
This kind of passion has really made an impact on me in my first few days in Copenhagen. Dozens of demonstrations like this are taking place every day, each highlighting particular aspects of the climate crisis.
My belief is that whether or not a fair and safe deal is struck this week – and there is still time to do so – a climate justice movement is already being formed here by the thousands of campaigners who have travelled from all over the world to be in Copenhagen.
Their message is simple: if our governments won’t take action themselves, then we’ll do it instead.
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