Inspiration before Copenhagen

On the 50th anniversary of the Antarctic Treaty, and on the eve of the Copenhagen Climate Summit, Greenpeace has produced a truly inspirational video featuring my Varda Group colleague Kelly Rigg who was the coordinator of the Greenpeace Antarctica Campaign in the 1980s and early 90s.

If a handful of people were able to protect the Antarctic continent at the time, the contemporary mass movement to protect the climate should manage to be heard, says (in a nutshell but with nicer words) Kelly in the video. When we first called for the Antarctic continent to become a World Park, reasonable people thought we were wasting their (and our) time. Until a moratorium on Antarctic minerals exploitation was adopted (the Madrid Protocol of 1991). What was deemed impossible and unrealistic only a few years earlier had become law.

In Copenhagen, Life is in balance. It shouldn't be so hard to make it again.

Click here to watch and share the video.

Visionaries

Kelly sent us a few days ago this reproduction of an advert published in 1962 in Life Magazine. Since it's been circulating within the Tcktcktck world for a few days, I suppose I'm not the first one to blog it, but I can't resist.

"Each day Humble supplies enough energy to melt 7 million tons of glaciers!"

Humble Oil & Refining Company merged with Standard Oil which later became Exxon.

"The petroleum energy Humble supplies - if converted into heat -- could melt [a giant glacier] at the rate of 80 tons each second".

Maybe in 1962 someone at Humble had read the IPCC assessment report in a crystal ball.

Green House

I've painted The White House pale green because of course it's not quite become The Green House yet as (sobber as usual) Richard Black of the BBC points out.

The devil is in the details, and of course a lot of them need to be sorted out before and after Copenhagen. But if we look back in time and want to be optimistic, it's greening. Personally, I find today's White House announcement encouraging. A greening White House against Green House Gases, I like the metaphore.

Let's keep an eye on the State Department Copenhagen website they've just launched.

Whatever happens in Copenhagen, it will be a watershed. Copenhagen means the awareness of the globalization of vulnerability.

Of course the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and other developing countries (like the Africans who made their voice heard at the recent Barcelona Climate Talks, as well as -- for example -- the Filipinos with half their bodies in the water) are the prime victims. But how can we avoid noting that in little more than half a century (since the French economist and demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the word Third World in 1952) we moved from a world whose aspiration was to integrate that third part of the world to the other two (to either of the two dominating Cold War regimes) to exactly the opposite?

We have entered a world where we are all sharing the consequences of the planetary life system's vulnerability, enhanced (caused) by the damage we're doing to the climate and to biodiversity.

We're all on the same boat. Or life raft?

Talk shops

It's climate talk season for everyone, everywhere.

I'll be speaking again in Madrid this week, this time at the request of the Spanish Foreign Affairs Ministry's Casa Asia, their Asia House.

Last week's dialogue at the Spanish Observatory of Sustainability was very stimulating, so I'm looking forward to this other one this week.

I'm also speaking this week in Barcelona at the ASEFUAN Dialogue also organized by Casa Asia.

The energy around major international meetings such as Copenhagen is startling, regardless of the actual outcome.

The meetings of Parties to Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) have become for environmentalists the equivalent of the Christians' Sunday mass (or maybe the Muslims' midday prayer). And the "summits" are the equivalent of the Christmas Midnight Mass or the Ramadan. The next one of those is Copenhagen.

Previously we've had, among others, the Earth Summit in Rio, the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, and -- exactly 10 years ago -- the WTO Seattle Conference (I was there too).

Following with the analogy on religions, at these meetings and summits, you find all sorts of people. Sincere and inspired people, inspiring individuals who can move mountains...and also people who do not have much to do, but come out of curiosity or only to be seen.

Expect

When he is not busy growing giant lemon fruits (photo), the former Director of the European Environment Agency, Domingo Jimenez Beltrán of Spain facilitates stimulating policy dialogues within his country.

He's asked me to participate next Thursday in a panel discussion about expectations viz the Copenhagen Climate Summit and the upcoming Spanish EU Presidency, in Madrid's Botanical Garden.

As the expectations for Copenhagen are evolving (shrinking?) by the day, I guess I'll have to prepare my speaking notes at the last minute.

Face up

I've just spent four days in Bogota, Colombia where Transparency International asked me to give a two-day Advocacy Training course for their Latin American chapters.

By pure coincidence the course took place this week when Transparencia por Colombia launched their campaign Ponga la Cara. [I suppose it would best translate as Face up].

Face up for your votes.

Until recently, the individual votes of parlamentarians and municipal council members in Colombia were not recorded. I suppose they'd say that this lack of transparency was necessary to protect them. But for Transparencia por Colombia this goes against the right-to-know and it can enhance corruption. A new law was recently enacted whereby individual votes must now be recorded and publicized. But so far it's been hardly implemented, hence Transparencia por Colombia's Face Up campaign calling for effective implementation.

The two-day training course in a hotel in downtown Bogota was pretty dense. So it was good to get out on Tuesday morning and join Transparencia por Colombia's Director Elisabeth Ungar and her team (photo) who were inviting in front of the Colombian Congress building the parliamentarians to "put their faces up". We stayed for about 90 minutes, but by the time we had to leave none had paused to face up.

Wind the clock

Conversations in the last two days at the Barcelona Climate Talks were all about the best way to rewind the Copenhagen clock.

The clock hasn't stopped ticking but it's losing a few seconds every minute or every hour. It's been the case for quite some time of course, but the fact that after Barcelona everyone knows this raises a tactical issue: Will civil society remain politically relevant in the coming weeks with a slogan "fair, ambitious, binding treaty now" which everyone knows can't be achieved in that time frame unless something extraordinary happens?

Repetition, repetition, repetition is okay for campaigning purposes. Yes, but as long as this approach does not prevent adaptation to evolving realities.

Maybe it is time to adapt the public communication to make sure the complex formula currently under consideration to secure that the Copenhagen legacy is at least a big step in the right direction can be understood by the general public even if there is no new treaty this year.

There is a nice user-friendly table on the BBC website, describing the main regional groups' positions.