Anyone following the long-running debate about access to medicines in the developing world will know that intellectual property is regularly sharply criticised as the culprit. It is a highly disputed claim. And even then, we know IP is necessary to help promote medicine innovation which is vital to ensure there are medicines to distribute.
But there are dead weight losses on the sale of medicines that only add to the final cost, without benefit, and particularly tariffs. A new report from the International Policy Network makes this point that highlights the current trend in medicine tariffs in the developing world. The report finds that generally the tariff levels are going down, but still remain prohibitively high in the least developed countries of the world. Tariffs are also more widespread on antibiotics in places like Sub-Saharan Africa.
Ensuring universal access to medicines is one of the greatest challenges humanity faces. But first, and foremost, governments shouldn’t be shifting the blame when they’re still clearly responsible for high prices themselves.
I was going to write an article along these lines, but Richard Fleming from the Global Poverty Project did it for me. Like with climate change, the biggest threat from natural disasters isn’t an unforeseen or unpredictable event but the amplification of its impact caused by poverty.
Fleming correctly points out that there are plenty of equivalent natural disasters around the world in rich countries that take a much smaller toll on human life. The reason is because the population is wealthy and can a) cope with the disaster better such as fresh water supply and distribution channels for food, and b) less damage is done to the country that increases the events impact such as the Japanese buildings in earthquake prone areas built on springs.
The situation in Haiti is an absolute disaster. But in addition to delivering a band aid solution through post-disaster aid, we must promote economic development that means the next natural disaster in Haiti isn’t as severe and enables the Haitians to better manage the consequences.
The ambition for the city of Copenhagen to have its name bandied around as a major international treaty, like the Kyoto Protocol, is officially over.
After two weeks of mostly show-ponying by negotiators, Ministers, and now leaders the Copenhagen Conference has resulted in a weak Copenhagen Accord to commit countries to further cooperative efforts to cut emissions, and that is really about it.
Unsurprisingly green groups are outraged, but it begs the question – why? The Kyoto Protocol was a monumental failure and didn’t deliver any significant emissions reductions but still rallied activist and political campaigns to dupe the public into thinking its ratification would mean something. Why don’t they just go on that roundabout again?
To their credit leaders have managed to whittle down the pre-conference one hundred and eighty-odd pages of negotiating text down to just three, but it has come at the expense of meaning anything.
Some negotiators were clearly hanging out for President Obama’s arrival to either charm leaders out of their established negotiating positions or bring something new to the table. He did neither.
Instead Obama’s short speech to the conference plenary was probably the most insulting and patronising speech delivered by a US President in a long time. Obama poorly understood the mood of the audience and chose to behave like an infallible school master lecturing children about the importance of keeping their socks up to maintain school dignity, rather than appealing to each leader’s hopes to share in collective victory. It was put best by a journalist from The Guardian that Obama’s speech received “polite applause”.
Reportedly there was a lot of “mistrust” in negotiations, with bitterness in the mouths of some countries who have experienced the behaviour of leaders, like Kevin Rudd, who has allegedly personally bullied small Pacific island nations into gaining support for Australia’s position. But small Pacific island nations clearly responded to Rudd with the strength bullies cannot counter.
Now the politicking of the conference, at least in the English language press, has veered sharply in favour of Europe and the United States who have made it clear they believed the major barrier to an agreement was China. But calling out an entire country with a culture that believes in the importance of ‘saving face’ is unlikely to prompt endearment.
Instead Western leaders appeared to be accepting what the Chinese negotiators have been whispering for two days – worthwhile negotiations are over. As a consequence they’re calling out China to try and save their own ‘face’ for when their domestic constituencies rightly criticise them for lumping so much false hope onto the outcome of a conference any considered observer knew wasn’t going to deliver before it started.
The Australian population now rightly should be asking Kevin Rudd why he kept pointing to a presumed new Copenhagen treaty to justify his failed Emissions Trading Scheme when he knew deep down it was misleading at best, and deceptive at worst.
Negotiations continued late into the night with the ambition of the US delegation to bring China to the table with a signing pen in hand. It appears to have succeeded. But rather than being remembered for a significant global commitment to cut carbon emissions the city of Copenhagen is likely to be recognised as the first of many uncrossed hurdles to secure a credible post-Kyoto pact.
Apparently the arrival of Gordon Brown, Robert Mugabe, Hugo Chavez and Kevin Rudd in the Danish capital wasn’t enough to seal a climate change deal and everyone is now waiting on Barak Obama to arrive and deliver. But the warning from US negotiators today was “No, he can’t” break any deadlock between countries because what’s on the table is as good as he’s able to get through the US Congress.
But then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, arrived to declare “Yes, she can” by offering the US’ help to create a $100 billion-a-year climate adaptation for developing countries on the condition that they also seek emissions cut. Developing countries now finally have the adaptation slush fund they want, but with strings they don’t want attached.
The test is now whether developing countries can now get past their childhood taunting games where the United States emits carbon, then India and China reciprocates, and when daddy Executive Secretary, Yvo de Boer, intervenes India and China claims “the US started it” as a means of absolving themselves of any wrongdoing.
But China’s view isn’t shared by all countries. The focus of the last scheduled day of the conference tomorrow is whether developing countries will hold together and take the US’ adaptation fund bait or whether the mounting criticism of India and China’s hardline negotiating position will break them apart. It’s not clear, but like separating a politician from tax dollars, it’s hard to stand between developing country governments and a pot of gold especially when the obligations that come with it will fall onto their successors.
Meanwhile Kevin Rudd has been trying to deal himself into the negotiations by pulling at heart-strings in a speech to the conference arguing for an agreement to make Canberra primary school girl “little Gracie” proud. It’s cute, but is more likely to sway the Australian public that many developing country governments who have, and in some cases let, thousands of little Gracies die each year from a lack of food because they’d rather protect the interests of their mates or use food money to line their Swiss bank accounts.
Speaking of Robert Mugabe, his attendance is correctly causing a stink after his recent speech declaring that the West responsible for any anthropogenic climate change. It is certainly a safe claim for him to make since his thinly veiled dictatorship has destroyed Zimbabwe’s economy ensuring they couldn’t emit greenhouse gases even if they wanted to.
And it may shock some readers, but today I agree with Deputy Greens Party leader, Christine Milne, when she said on Sky News yesterday that “There is a real risk here (in Copenhagen) that you will get a political agreement because world leaders are not coming here to go home with a loss of face and they will want some sort of photo opportunity”. And her criticism is spot on because a bad deal is actually worse than no deal at all.
A bad deal is likely to only be a puff political statement that all leaders can agree to. But the risk is also that it sets out the architecture for an agreement while pushing all of the unresolved issues to contact groups, reference groups or sub committees.
That’s a risk because it means issues start to be dealt with in isolation rather than being negotiated as part of a broader package where costs in one stream are offset by gains in other streams.
If a bad deal is struck it would be better for the meeting to fail because the risks of doing so are comparatively small, climate aside, and that is where discussions are now heading.
And before everyone loses perspective international negotiations regularly fail, and normally more than once. In fact most take at least five years to secure an insufficient agreement and longer for a semi-good one.
Take the Doha Round of trade negotiations that are stalled in their eighth year, and they’re about liberalising trade to increase economic gain. This round of climate change negotiations is only in its second year and is all about how we’re going to distribute economic pain.
A Copenhagen failure will be like getting an extension on a school assignment where everyone aims to get it done by the deadline, but work, or in this case the global economic crisis, and breaking up with your boyfriend, meaning insufficient political will, always seems to hit right at the part when you were about to put pen to paper.
Eventually you do get the assignment done, it just tends to be when you have more breathing space, or you just push off dealing with something else. And for punishment you get a little knock down in your final grade for being late or if climate change evangelists are to be believed, a couple of more floods per year.
The great Australian post-pubescent European backpacking self discovery tour is about to get a lot more expensive if a tax proposal is adopted to break one of the many Copenhagen deadlocks.
The deadlock-busting proposal is to tax international travel and shipping to be tipped into a fund for developing countries to adapt to a changing climate which might bring many developing countries closer to the main negotiating proposals.
At this point the proposal appears to have taken the interest of Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, whose arrival last night was the chatter for the conference, at least for a couple of minutes, but even then no one was say anything very nice.
Reportedly chief negotiator for the G77 developing county bloc plus China took a leaf out of Bob Brown’s hymn book attacking Rudd because on climate change “the message Kevin Rudd is giving to his people, his citizens, is a fabrication, it’s fiction … (and) all that Australia has done so far is simply not good enough”.
Tough words, and they’re deliberate for two reasons.
First, it is a political/media strategy to get negative publicity for developed country leaders in their domestic press in the hope that it will make them blink during the current Mexican standoff over whose Copenhagen proposals will win the day. Developing countries also know they’re harsh quotes will, for example, get a better run in Australian media, than Kevin Rudd’s will in Chinese media.
Second, China knows that developed country governments aren’t nearly as committed to reducing carbon emissions as they claim when they call climate change the greatest moral challenge of our time.
Earlier this year I read a report from the Victorian State government about its climate change efforts and by the end was convinced there were emissions from producing the report than those reduced by the policies articulated between its covers.
And government indifference to serious emissions reduction is driven by political greed because they don’t want to be exposed to the voter policy backlash from actually cutting emissions.
If you, yes YOU, genuinely care about climate change you wouldn’t be reading my or Christine’s blog posts because you wouldn’t be prepared to emit the carbon caused by electricity generation.
Cutting emissions requires a radical reapproach to the way we live our lives, not just the low hanging fruit of installing the occasional pink batt and encouraging consumers to buy GreenPower.
But the actual indifference of developed country taxpayers may be why the developing country tax proposal may sneak through because the cost will principally fall onto rich people in developed countries because they’re both the source of outbound tourists and also trade most in goods and services.
Australia will carry a particularly large part of the cost because of our necessity to fly and ship goods and services because of our geographic isolation. And the extra cost on international travel will largely hit people who travel overseas regularly including wealthy people, business travelers and Kevin Rudd. Unpopularly though it will also hit the once-in-a-lifetime Disneyland trip for the average Aussie battler family.
Apart from the developing country tax proposal there has only been one other area of significant negotiating progress on deforestation issues.
In a shout out to Australia’s Climate Change Ambassador, Louise Hand, the current negotiating position of Australia is against the conversion of forests for agriculture use to sequester carbon and provide sustainable industries for rural developing country farming communities.
I disagree with this policy since if you can convert forest land into both a carbon stock and provide sustainable economic development you should, but apparently it’s not a view shared by others as reflected in deforestation negotiating text like the NGOs who have now been rationed out of attendance.
Since attendance rationing for NGOs commenced yesterday the proportion of adults with tidy haircuts and designer clothing has risen against the number of large groups of ‘yoofs’ wearing the same slogan-laden t-shirts.
But that doesn’t mean all the theatrics have been lost.
In a corridor yesterday a woman was handing out chocolate coated ginger ‘carbon cake’ to people from developed countries who’d already emitted enough carbon and was going to be allowed to emit more under a Copenhagen agreement.
Tomorrow the real clamp down occurs and delegates need a special silver pass to get anywhere near the conference centre. But with only one thousand issued my only chance of getting one is to buy one off EBay.
But instead of coming from the inside of the Bella Conference Centre I’ll probably be blogging from inside a pub surrounded by other kicked out observers who’ll be watching proceedings while playing drinking games and taking a shot every time the Chinese blame developed countries for risking failure, G77 countries threatening a walkout and America calling for China to do more.
It’s a good thing the sun sets early because with a drinking game like that beer-o-clock is going to need to come around earlier rather later.
The first snow fall of the conference hasn’t stopped people wanting to get into the Bella Conference Centre with waits of up to four hours for new registrants, with total registrations now topping 45,000 to get into a venue that holds only 15,000. And the biggest overflow is from non-government observers.
NGOs don’t actually like being called NGOs. They prefer being referred to as “civil society” because it bestows greater establishment and credibility to claim they’re representing people, like governments, and as a consequence should participate in negotiations. Fortunately governments aren’t stupid enough to give them that license, but they come close.
A friend of mine has a theory that deep down all NGO delegates attend because they want to be in the actual negotiating rooms working on an agreement. Following yesterday’s walkout by developing countries such a fantasy could have been realised since negotiating rooms were empty but all perfectly set up for a game of mock NGO UN.
But the recommencement of negotiations means NGO delegates have had to ditch their serious-suits and get back into their polar bear costumes.
In response to rationed attendance NGOs have demanded that they still have access to conference proceedings and copies of all conference material, despite just about everything being available on the UNFCCC website.
So because some NGOs don’t have access to some documents and closed-door negotiations they’re planning to storm the conference centre at 10am. Organisers claim it will be a non-violent storming, but when you have Danish Police pushing one way and protestors pushing in the reverse I’m willing to bet at some point someone will do something more than simply push.
And apparently we should get used to climate civil unrest. That was the warning from former Irish President and now head United Nations Human Rights Commissioner, Mary Robinson, who has claimed that people affected by climate change are likely to start getting unruly and may even start litigating against governments for climate-inaction.
That seems unlikely since the world’s poor haven’t been able to litigate against bad trade subsidies in the United States and Europe that have been doing much more harm for a lot longer.
Meanwhile officials are only reporting negotiating progress at the fringes, which means they’ve all agreed they might be working through this weekend as well.
But the media void left by negotiators has quickly been filled by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not that anyone appears to be listening to what he’s saying.
And local governments are also seeking to appear to be stepping up to the climate-leadership plate, or at least that is what capital city Mayors think they’re doing in their push to have local governments referenced in a final Copenhagen text.
But since local governments aren’t recognised under international law it seems ‘recognition’ means the permanent right to dupe the public that they can do anything to tackle climate change to fulfil their Copenhagen obligations. That or it’s that or symbolism? Or just a junket?
At least a junket is rationally motivated, unlike the entrants in the competition for Copenhagen’s wackiest.
The current contenders are the LaRouche Movement conspiracy theorists decrying global warming as “British genocide” as they approach conference-going delegates arriving each morning.
But they now face stiff competition from Supreme Master Ching Hai’s followers who, dressed in animal suits, are also lining the train stations to hand out hardcover copies of the Supreme Master’s books “The dogs in my life” and the Amazon bestseller “The birds in my life”.
Then there’s the head of the British National Party, Nick Griffin MEP, who compared biofuel policies with the managed agriculture policies that led to the deaths of millions under China’s Mao and Russian’s Stalin.
Mary Robinson’s commentary today also deserves a worthy mention.
Al Gore also probably deserves entry for his stumble, some say deliberate, over the rate of melting of the polar ice caps.
Week two of the Copenhagen conference has kicked off with a bang, and I’m not talking about the developing countries walkout.
Head of World Vision, Tim Costello, decried Tony Abbott as “singing solo” against the tide of climate change support.
According to Costello Abbott should fly to Copenhagen so he can take the 30,123 delegates to 30,124 and learn about how the rest of the world thinks climate change is the greatest moral challenge of our time.
The problem is that not even Costello believes his rhetoric.
If Costello believed that rising sea levels will flood Bangladesh every emission counts and he should’ve stayed at home, saved the emissions and delivered his commentary and presentations by video conference.
But instead, according to his own script, he’s traded off the fate of poor Bangladeshis so he can contribute to the Copenhagen circus in the flesh.
And even if Abbott did arrive he wouldn’t find the sort of consensus Costello paints.
I’ve no doubt Costello is hearing lots of government delegates saying they think climate change is the greatest moral challenge of their time, it’s just that they say it as cover for their immediately following comments about why its someone else’s fault to cut emissions. The statement has as much credibility as “I don’t mean to offend, but …”.
And if governments actually thought climate change was the greatest moral challenge of our time there’d be an agreement already, but its actually an issue few political leaders are prepared to spend serious political capital on.
Costello’s suffering from climate change group think that occurs when you’re surrounded by twenty thousand self-flagellating green activists who are all convinced if this conference fails the end is nigh.
Costello aside, the arrival of Ministers was supposed to end the polite discussion between bureaucrats so the impolite discussions can be held to nut out a deal, hence the walkout by developing countries.
Depending on your perspective informs what you think Copenhagen should deliver.
The United States basically wants the Kyoto Protocol to sunset at end of the 2012 emissions reduction commitment period and be succeeded by a looser agreement in the long term cooperative track that brings all countries to the table. Australia basically wants a second commitment period under Kyoto with new obligations through the LCA track. Developing countries only want commitments through Kyoto because it doesn’t oblige them to do anything.
While most at the conference appear dismayed at the current state of the negotiations, they shouldn’t be surprised because the current negotiating positions are consistent with those announced before the conference if anyone had been listening.
Developing countries even announced the intention of a walkout twice before the conference.
The negotiations are now back on, but for those who came all the way to Copenhagen to be able to say that they were there when the agreement to save the world was struck it may be the last day they can get into the conference centre anyway.
Tomorrow delegates need a special pass to get into the isolated Bella Conference Centre.
And with one hundred and ten heads of government and states accompanied by their security details on Thursday and Friday, the allowable number of delegates into the centre will be reached with government delegations and the media alone.
As a consequence non-government observers will be scaled back to one thousand on Thursday and a mere ninety on Friday.
Rumours around the conference are that a group of NGOs will try and storm the conference centre to try and get access to political leaders. But the fastest way to make sure political leaders go elsewhere is to risk their security.
Instead they’d be better off cracking open a non-carbonated beer, putting their feet up and watching the deliberations from their laptops. No matter what they do it’ll be the closest they actually get to the conference.
Considering the religious fervour that many climate evangelists bring to the issue Sunday is, appropriately, an official day of rest.
But at the Copenhagen climate change conference that only means negotiators turn up to the Bella Conference Centre at ten and the arrested activists from Saturday’s protests can sleep in a bit longer in their cells.
The events of Saturday’s protests are still dominating the media coverage with increasing criticism that the Police behaved in a heavy-handed way.
The folks from left-wing activist group, GetUp!, allegedly have video showing the Danish Police being overly aggressive and charging the protestors. They may be right, but if I were a GetUp! donor I’d want to know why the activists I’d paid to go to Copenhagen were warm and rugged up in their hotel suite videoing the protest, rather than being on the frontline.
Meanwhile consistent reports are that the actual negotiations are going nowhere and emissions verification is proving to be a key stumbling block.
Because governments can so easily report compliance with their emissions targets, but actually just let emissions grow to help improve the competitive position of domestic industries, developed countries want emissions reductions externally verified.
Considering many developing countries don’t have the technical or regulatory capacity to verify their own emissions it may not seem to be an unreasonable ask, but major developing countries like China and India also understandably don’t like the bad faith injected into verification requirements.
There is a lot of bad faith in negotiations because some developing countries approach negotiations with a North / South perspective that developed countries have been out on an all night bender, and developing countries are now being asked to pay part of the bill.
As a consequence bad proposals are being put into negotiating texts like the scrapping of intellectual property rights on climate-friendly technologies by a motley crew of negotiators from Bangladesh, Bolivia, Ghana and India.
The fact that removing IP will simply harm climate-friendly technology innovation and reduce access to the technologies to reduce emissions doesn’t’ seem to matter, because from a North / South perspective scrapping IP is about making sure developed country businesses cannot profit from developing country emissions reductions.
However there would be one thing that would bring China to the table and it’s the same central key to unlocking a final Copenhagen agreement – money.
For developing countries they want a big adaptation finance pool that will be funded by rich countries, and the size of that pool will dictate the level of emissions reduction they’re prepared to commit to.
For developed countries the negotiations are about how much they have to give to that adaptation financing pool, and how much they’ll have to harm their economies and their competitive advantage against developing countries through emissions reduction as well.
That is, of course, except for Europe because it has already started absorbing the cost of emission reduction and wants everyone else to take on the burden so they can stop shooting themselves in the foot.
Tim Wilson is Director of the Climate and Trade Unit at the Institute of Public Affairs and is blogging from Copenhagen at www.sustainabledev.org
Shockingly, representatives from the British Hadley Centre confessed they had a problem at the start of their late Friday afternoon side event on the science of climate change.
But before sceptics get excited it was an audio visual confession that they were having problems with their microphones.
And in a second blow to sceptics the microphone issues were quickly fixed by the attendants and the three panellists continued their presentations of climate-induced doom and gloom.
There was some comfort in a concession by a panellist that two degrees of warming could deliver many positive benefits, but an average four degree temperature rise would only carry downsides.
What was surprising was that the topic of the leaked emails and documents that has prompted ‘Climategate’ didn’t come up in the questions and answers section.
But apparently questions were being asked elsewhere.
At another side event Director of the film Not Evil, Just Wrong that criticised the science of climate change, Phelim McAleer, asked Professor Stephen Schneider from Stanford University about ‘Climategate’. But the organisers appeared to decide it was easier to throw McAleer out of the event than allow Schneider to answer his question.
While negotiations progress throughout the weekend, most of the comings and goings are behind closed doors which means for entertainment you’re better off staying in town than catching the train to the Bella Conference Centre.
On Saturday there was a rare discussion about the impact of a Copenhagen agreement at a symposium on trade and climate change organised by the World Trade Organisation and the Faculty of Law at the University of Copenhagen.
But out of the thirty-one thousand people registered for the Copenhagen Conference, less than fifty seemed interested in the impact of the international agreement they want by attending.
Most of the observers were outside the Danish Parliament protesting for an international, legally binding emissions reduction treaty.
As protests go it was largely predictable with chants led from a central stage asking the crowd “what do we want?”, with the response “a legally binding treaty”, “when do we want it?”, “NOW”. And then the protestors marched to the Conference Centre to the sound of beating drums.
That was until about three hundred masked youths broke ranks with the calls for a “peaceful” protest and started smashing things. Many were probably tense after their failed attempt to incite a violent protest on Friday morning.
You’ve got to hand it to the organisers of today’s protest though they successfully turned out a large crowd reported to be between thirty thousand and one hundred thousand people, but from my observations I’d it was closer to the former.
Unlike the conference there was a much greater presence of anti-capitalist sentiment amongst protestors today with placards and posters decrying “toxic capitalism” and “change the system, not the climate”.
Clearly these protestors have never looked at the rising emissions from centrally planned economies.
But opposition to capitalism clearly only went so far with a little coffee stall where you could get a “green bean” coffee.
I presume the protestors turned a blind eye to the fact that beans were imported from the other side of the world by a carbon emitting shipping line and traded on globalised international markets.
But considering how cold it is in Copenhagen I can understand putting ideology to one side especially when the objective is to warm up. Oh, except when it is the climate.
Day five of the Copenhagen climate change conference has finally delivered some modest negotiating progress through the release of summary reports for the Chairs of the LCA and KP tracks.
To make themselves feel important most delegates at international negotiating conferences always talk in acronyms, but at Copenhagen they’re in over drive.
KP means the first track to establish a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol for cutting emissions when the first commitment period expires in 2012.
LCA means the second track of long-term cooperative action to establish a new agreement that brings all countries to the table on emissions reduction, the establishment of adaptation funds, the transfer of technology and issues around deforestation and forest degradation.
And then there’s discussions about the inclusion of CCS in the CDM, the current progress of SBSTA and whether IP is still in the EGTT. And don’t get me started on the role of JIs in ITC! And how could I forget GEF?
If you don’t know what I am talking about I’m sure the ICC can explain it to you, and if you cannot find them just go to WWF, FOE or an observer organisation from UNEP, UNCTAD or the WTO.
And that’s only scratching the surface.
Anyway, the LCA and KP Chair’s texts were confidentially circulated to country delegations early this morning, so green groups got copies, had read them and were telling negotiators what they don’t like about them over morning tea. But to give faith that confidential does mean something it took me until after lunch for my copy.
And the texts so far say more about what hasn’t been achieved, than what has.
Any subject area of substance remains bracketed which means no one has agreed to it, or the text doesn’t include proposals and instead refers the issue to a newly formed reference group or subcommittee to ensure debate about that one issue doesn’t cause further deadlocks.
So on day five not much has been achieved outside of process and cutting out the really bad ideas, but at least it is now in writing.
One of the most entertaining aspects of these conferences is how delegates walk around busying themselves and pretending they understand what is actually going on.
Or worse, carrying a folder and telling negotiators what they think should be going on.
Each area of negotiations is highly specialised and requires an incredible amount of background knowledge to understand. But that doesn’t stop NGO representatives demanding to know the progress of discussions on bunker fuels and making sure they collect the latest copy of the daily programme of events tome.
I’m the first to admit I know what’s happening in the expert group on technology transfer, that’s EGTT, and broadly the comings and goings in the main LCA track, but I’d be lying if I said I understood the full complexities of REDD.
The total number of registered observers now exceeds the total capacity of the Conference Centre, excluding government delegates and the media, so starting the second week observer entry will be rationed which means Greenpeace will have two hundred protestors admitted entry.
That should be a welcome development, but unfortunately for ordinary Copenhagians it means twenty thousand people are about to be forced onto the streets to go to bars all day and drink legitimately tax deductable beer before they protest.
Though the rationing shouldn’t be too much of a problem by next Thursday because from then on the focus is on the plenary session and the rhetoric-laden speeches delivered by heads of governments and States will be broadcast on the web.
Apparently the CPH Crowne Plaza has also been booked to give the single observer delegate in attendance that can’t web stream the proceedings because they didn’t bring a laptop. If you don’t know what CPH means it is actually how someone referred to Copenhagen earlier today.
But seriously, in addition to most delegates having their own, the conference centre has two big rooms of about two hundred laptops each permanently available for delegates to check what GEF means on the UNFCCC website to avoid the total humiliation of confessing that they don’t know and putting their friend in the impossible position of confessing the same.
And then there are the hundreds of computer terminals with webcams and Skype so observers can acronym their friends back home to boredom.
That last sentence may appear a bit cynical, but on my count I’ve used twenty different acronyms in this post alone. TGIF. Oops, better make that twenty one.
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