-1 day til COP 15 | The meeting that failed before it started …
by Tim Wilson, December 7, 2009
It’s less than 12 hours until the opening of the meeting declared a failure before it has even started - COP 15 (the 15th Meeting of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change).
For the next two weeks Sustainable Development will be blogging from the Conference and providing regular updates of what is actually happening absent the media and political spin. And, more importantly, we will expose the absurdity of the event that has caused emissions likely to exceed those saved by the Conference’s outcomes. Initial observations include:
UN bureaucrats want the public to do as they say, not as they do
The COP15 Press Room
Despite the claimed necessity for us all to cut back on our emissions, there is no serious interest in reducing one of the largest sources of emissions at COP15 – energy consumption. And the picture above demonstrates it perfectly – a near-empty room full of turned on laptop computers to help delegates communicate to the world the importance of energy conservation.
An obscene number of participants have registered for no meaningful purpose
It took an hour and a half of waiting in line today to achieve registration because there are so many activists in attendance that they thought Mother Nature could take some emissions for the team by flying to Copenhagen to fight for Mother Nature’s interests. According to a helpful UNFCCC assistant registered NGO observers exceeds 20,000 and is so large that the UNFCCC Secretariat didn’t have time to enter them all into their computer system.
Sunday is the calm before the storm
COP15 Plenary Hall
Despite taking an hour and a half to register, Sunday is really the calm before the storm. If you want to know what the world’s largest talk-fest looks like empty, here is a picture of the empty Plenary Hall. Simplistically international meetings of this size are generally broken into three areas, 1. The Plenary Hall where Ministers and Leaders making bold but meaningless statements to television cameras, 2. The private negotiating rooms where the real action happens and is off-limits to the media and public who don’t need, or want, to see how the political equivalent of sausages are made, and 3. the observers area that includes activists, non-government organisations and media adding ‘flavour’ to the tedium of a two week meeting doomed to failure.
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