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Dispatches from the Summit From Sierra Club activists on the ground in Montreal for the COP 11/ MOP 1 climate conference. Friday, 9 December Thirty U.S. Sierrans and 50 Canadian Sierrans (including the fabulous youth contingent) gathered along with the "parties," the Ministers of the Environments, and other Non Governmental Organizations, in wintry Montreal. We nobly listened, pushed, cajoled, and argued on how to agree on a process, plan, structure (words are important in U.N. negotiations!) to reduce the pollutions causing our planet's climate to shift. Elizabeth May, Executive Director, and Amelia Clarke, President, of Sierra Club of Canada provided leadership as did the host country's Prime Minister, Paul Martin. The Sierra Club U.S. sought to find the leadership in our obstructionist country ... and find it we did! We successfully got the message out that United States leadership on climate change can be found in our states and city halls, union halls and boardrooms. Meanwhile, the world will have to wait for a federal government that will live up to its responsibilities and represent us on a multilateral front.
Mayor Nickels launched the U.S. Mayor's Climate Protection Agreement on Feb 16, the same day that the Kyoto Protocol international global warming treaty took effect in 141 nations worldwide. 192 mayors have now signed on. along with the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The favorite handout for the event was our brochure "Cool Cities: Solving Global Warming One City at a Time." Has your mayor signed on? If not, check out "Four Steps to Become a Cool City." Let me know if you are going to make your town or city a Cool City. -- Lisa Renstrom - Sierra Club President Friday, 9 December Today is the showdown between the Bush administration and the entire rest of the world over global warming. I’m on the floor of the main convention hall (you can watch the proceedings live on the net here). There are two formal bodies meeting here today, and it’s important to understand the difference:
The administration’s opposition reached a new level of absurdity late last evening, as U.S. chief negotiator Harlan Watson walked out of the ministerial meeting considering the final COP text, which had already been watered down to accommodate U.S. objections. Throughout the week, the U.S. delegation has objected not only to the Kyoto Protocol but to any discussions, dialogue, meetings, workshops -- even thingies. (The Climate Action Network ran a contest to find a term the US would agree to, but "thingy" didn’t qualify and no winning entry was received). For the most part, the conference has had all the usual earmarks of a decision-making meeting -- late night pow wows, cajoling behind the scenes, posturing in the plenaries, arm-twisting in the hallways, and strategizing over cafeteria lunch trays. But the U.S. government performance this week has been nothing short of extraordinary – unprecedented in their obstinacy and resolute in their commitment to wreck a process that clearly has incredibly strong worldwide support. To highlght that clash even more, former president Bill Clinton is arriving later this morning and (although things are in complete flux) may make an appearance. Word of Clinton’s arrival has been electrifying, not least among the media, especially from the U.S.. What role will Clinton play in this rapidly emerging drama? The positions of successive U.S. administrations could not be more in contrast. The Bush administration, even with its intransigent policy, could have taken a moderate role at the UN climate conference, approved a weak COP decision and let the COP/MOP (Kyoto) process go forward. But no. The White House has clearly ordained that the U.S. will take every possible step to block the truly united nations, even to the point of attempting to wreck the entire UN climate conference and the Kyoto process. The dramatic showdown comes in the hours ahead. -- Fred Huette, Global Warming & Energy Committee Tuesday, December 6th A room full of people -- reporters, representatives from other countries -- standing room only. I wander in to see Americans -- government officials -- on the podium. They are saying that the debate over the science of global warming is over, and that the impacts of rising sea levels, warmer temperatures, and intense weather will have real consequences. These officials go on to say that they are going to increase renewable energy to 33 percent by 2020, tackle CO2 emissions from cars, and engage in an ambitious program to achieve significant CO2 emissions overall in the decades to come.
In addition to this message about real action in the U.S., the Sierra Club hosted a fabulous press event feauturing the presidents of Sierra Club (U.S.) and Sierra Club of/du Canada, Mayor Greg Nickels of Seattle, Dave Foster of the Steel Workers Union, and Ray Anderson of Interface Carpet. This was our chance to drive home the fact that Americans at all levels -- from the grassroots to local leaders to labor unions and business interests -- are committing to reduce the pollution that causes global warming. The strong presence of Sierra Club volunteers from around the country is helping to send the message to other countries that American citizens will push harder to make more happen in the U.S. As Sierra Club president Lisa Renstrom said: "Let's get 1,000 mayors to sign the letter that Mayor Nickels started." We've got 192 now. Now the Club has a challenge! -- Ann Mesnikoff - Sierra Club Volunteer Monday, December 5Disconnect On a plane full of people, most of whom were heading to the climate conference, I sat next to a Peruvian man working in the Hispanic entertainment business in the U.S. When I explained why I was headed to Montreal, he told me his personal experiences with global warming. He was an avid mountain climber and used to hike up to a beautiful glacier and ice cave. Now the ice cave is gone and the glacier has retreated up the mountain. He said this all happened over the past 20 years. To add to this anecdote, on Monday local elected officials from several southeastern and Gulf Coast states held a press conference and spoke eloquently about their own experiences with global warming: "hyper-hurricanes" as they called them. These personal stories were conveyed again to the U.S. negotiating delegation headed by Harlan Watson. The local officials called for action and spoke of the need to be able to tell their children that the U.S. is going to join the world in addressing global warming. What they got back from the delegation was less than satisfactory. Their responses were about scientific uncertainty as to whether global warming is causing more intense storms and that we will need to do more to adapt to these kinds of events. Bill Hare from Greenpeace summed it up when he said there is a disconnect between the scientific urgency and the political response. That's certainly true when it comes to the U.S. delegation in Montreal. -- Ann Mesnikoff - Sierra Club Volunteer Monday, December 5Acronym-ing Friday night was the first chance I had to attend the Sierra Club Canada/Sierra Club U.S. organizational meeting. It was both interesting and enlightening, but first I want to cover what has happened today. 
I struck up a conversation with the man from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). He started to give party line answers about more research needs to be done and areas of uncertainty, but I don't think his heart was in it, because when I asked what research NOAA was doing to resolve their uncertainty, he told me that additional research would be a big problem since NOAA just got their budget two weeks ago, and they took big cuts. We agreed that this was a bad time to be cutting funding on climate research. As we were speaking, another man approached us. My new friend from NOAA introduced me to Trey Trigg, a member of the U.S. climate change negotiating team. We quickly established that Trey, who was also a member of the U.S. team at Kyoto, could easily out-acronym me. As I questioned him about the distance between the U.S. position on climate change and the rest of the world's, he tossed me the old line that the rest of the world was just too far ahead of the American people for the government to take a stronger position. The American people, he insisted, weren't ready to cut emissions by 36 percent in eight years (his claim of what Kyoto would require). He was nonplussed when instead of disagreeing with him, I said that the Sierra Club was ready to help him remedy that problem by building grassroots support for a new energy economy based on clean power and climate protection. We parted as possible allies, with me encouraging him to think about how we could work together on our common goal. Mother Nature doesn't care about politics and we need to get emission reductions going soon. Next was a big march calling for action beyond Kyoto and admonishing the U.S. delegation to get out of the way of progress. It was very orderly, not to mention icy cold and windy. I handed out flyers along the march. Note: Canadians are very polite and nice about taking a proffered flyer compared to people in D.C., and none of the flyers seemed to end up on the ground. Back to last night's Sierra Club organizational meeting: Three of Canada's 16 voting delegates are SCC members. Elizabeth May (Executive Director of Sierra Club of/du Canada) and her team of extraordinarily sharp, mostly young volunteers have been working on climate change negotiations since Kyoto, and are credited by the Canadian Foreign Minister (who is President of this whole conference) as being more knowledgeable than the Canadian government. Sierra Club of/du Canada can acronym right up there with Trey Trigg. The organization is active in forming the Canadian positions on Article 3.9 and Article 10 and other madly obscure but highly important negotiating points of the Kyoto Protocol. If I came away with anything from all this it was simply that grassroots support in the U.S. is the only way we can generate the needed rapid, orderly movement to a new energy economy based on clean power and climate protection. -- Bob Morris, DC Chapter Friday, 2 DecemberSave Hockey We woke to snow flurries this morning and all Montreal breathed a sigh of relief. The high temperature reached 65 degrees on Wednesday – a new record – and Canadians were very grumpy about the temporary loss of winter. None more than a coalition of youth groups under the banner of Save Hockey, who put on an exhibition without ice across the street from the Palais des Congres and drew a huge crowd of TV cameras and photographers. Their mock funeral for outdoor hockey made the national news and the front page of the Metro, the free commuter newspaper.
Increasing winter temperatures are jeopardizing the core Canadian cultural form called "shinny," where kids flood a backyard for a makeshift rink or go out on a frozen pond and play until the sun goes down and you can’t see the puck any more. Of commercial concern is the loss of ski slope time, and of course these are only symptoms of much larger issues such as losing capacity in the vast Canadian boreal forest, ranked by the IPCC as one of the largest carbon sinks in the world. Today, I attended a formal contact group (CG) meeting of countries writing a policy on carbon capture and storage (CCS), otherwise known as carbon sequestration. (You can follow daily reports of all the technical meetings in the IISD’s Earth Negotiation Bulletin). The idea is to recapture the CO2 from power plants and re-inject it permanently into the earth. The coal industry has launched a huge charm offensive behind this as part of their "clean coal" campaign. Out Global Warming & Energy Committee generally feels that sequestration is worth doing research on, but it’s unlikely to be significant for a decade, if ever. It’s important not to rely too much on unproven technologies when we have so many better options with existing ones. On Wednesday evening about 40 of us met with the US delegation, led by chief negotiator Harlan Watson. The meeting was cordial but started late and ended early. The US climate research program is basically good, but everything else about the Bush administration position pulls in a negative direction. We are very concerned that the US delegation not block progress in Montreal or retaliate against other countries pushing for strong global warming response. The US press is starting to see through the White House fog. Today’s Washington Post has an excellent editorial which picks up on CAN’s critique of the Bush administration position. At the end of the first week, there is at least one solid step forward: The Marrakech Accords, which are the rules for the Kyoto regime going forward, passed without objection. The Kyoto process stipulates that this year’s meeting should start working on the post-2012 period, following expiration of the first commitment period of 2008-2012. It cannot be underestimated how important this is, because without a strong launch, Kyoto may fall apart as an international framework for actually reducing greenhouse gases. We are waiting to see about two things: The strength of the proposals for post-2012, and whether the US delegation will actively try to undermine the process. In the last 24 hours, prospects on the first point have improved considerably. Next week there will be pressure on the Bush administration to keep its hands off and let the rest of the world take the necessary next steps toward addressing global warming. In the meantime, there will be a massive rally in Montreal on Saturday. Then everyone will take a breather and get ready for the second and deciding phase. -- Fred Huette, Global Warming & Energy Committee Wednesday, 30 NovemberOrientation Going to your first international conference is sort of like going to a new school. The same unfamiliar hallways quickly become all too familiar. The same boring construction and public furniture (the Palais des Congres is a very uninspiring edifice in a city full of magnificent architecture). Who will be my friend? Will I have to eat lunch by myself? Who are the good teachers? Where do the cool kids hang out? (OK, just kidding . . .) But at this "school" you already know some of the course work and students. Yesterday, for example, I found longtime friend Alden Meyer from the Union of Concerned Scientists, who has been to many of these meetings. Over at the Global Commons Institute in the exhibition area, looking for info on their "Contraction & Convergence" strategic scenarios, I ran into Michael Totten, whose work I relied on to develop low-income weatherization legislation in the 1980s. He’s now working for Conservation International on a big project in China. But the big thrill for me came at the Climate Action Network (CAN) daily meeting. CAN is the international coordinating body for environmental and civil society groups at these climate meetings. You’ll be hearing a lot about CAN because this is really the nerve center for the effort to push the climate negotiations in a more effective direction. They publish the daily ECO news bulletin at the conference. Like everything CAN seems to do, it’s put together in a very informal but action-oriented style. In addition to taking ideas for ECO, another feature of the daily meeting is setting the agenda for next morning’s CAN news conference. At 10 am, selected speakers put forth the basic coordinated message of the “ENGOs” (environmental NGOs) on the state of play in the climate negotations. Today, I was surprised when someone nominated Fran Pavley to speak. And yes, there she was, a few rows away -- Rep. Fran Pavley who sponsored AB 1493, the California clean cars law, in 2002. Under the Clean Air Act, other states can adopt the California standards. One part of AB 1493 specifically aims at reducing CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions from autos and light trucks, in order to curb rising temperatures and the formation of additional air pollution. Of course I wanted to meet and thank her personally. But even better, I got to show her the front page article from today’s Oregonian about how our governor, Ted Kulongoski, continues to push hard for adoption of the standards. The Oregon chapter and the Northwest regional staff are putting a tremendous effort into this, along with many other groups. That will also bring in Washington state, which hinged activation of its legislation last spring on Oregon’s adoption. We are fast reaching the point where the North American auto market is tipping toward "clean cars" that dramatically decrease greenhouse gas emissions and also happen to save fuel and money. This is the triple-win of energy efficiency that we often talk about, and at this moment it's probably the largest single thing being done to address global warming in the US. Which brings up another issue from yesterday’s CAN meeting. The chief US negotiator in Montreal, Harlan Watson, had a news conference at noon and announced what everyone except the US media knows to be true: The Bush administration is not only opposed to extending Kyoto targets beyond 2012, they are against even talking about it. Watson claimed that the US has outperformed many Kyoto-signatory countries (this is not really true; Watson's claims refer to sleight-of-hand "intensity reductions" as opposed to actual emmissions reductions). But Watson went even further. Of continuing global negotiations to work on effective targets for greenhouse gas reductions, he said flatly, "The United States is opposed to any such discussions." C’est ne pas une surprise. -- Fred Huette, Global Warming & Energy Committee Tuesday, 29 NovemberBienvenue a Montreal/Welcome to Montreal A difference of two degrees may seem a small matter, but last night in Montreal it made a pretty big difference. The Metropolis music hall was the site of an event called The Day Before sponsored by Equiterre, the dynamic environmental group that is the liaison with the Canadian government for the UN climate conference. More than a thousand people were in attendance for cabaret-style songs, stories, a live appearance from the Canadian Arctic via satellite, and rousing speeches by Sierra Club of Canada executive director Elizabeth May and others. Walking along Ste. Catherine Street later, rain was falling, freezing on the cold sidewalks. When that sheet of ice builds to quarter-inch thickness, as it did in some areas last night, it's called an ice storm. And as careful as you may be, it’s almost impossible to avoid slipping and falling. Which I did, losing a little pride but not much worse for wear. The temperature was 28 degrees Fahrenheit or minus two degrees Celcius. A swing of two degrees (C) in either direction would have made the difference between all rain and all snow. Many environmental groups and even some governments worldwide have set a two degree increase in average global temperatures as a realistic maximum. Beyond that point, there are real concerns about runaway processes that could destabilize the world’s climate. The concerns are profound and so are the potential changes in how our world society operates. I was thinking about that today as the climate conference got off to its official start: The 11th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the 1st Meeting of Parties for signatories of the now-in-force Kyoto Protocol. Thus, COP 11/MOP 1. In this web log, Sierra Club members who are observing the COP 11/MOP 1 meetings will bring you their impressions of the proceedings, providing pointers to "hard news" and interpretive information on the technical details, but also offering an inside look at how these meetings actually function. From stuffy insider-only diplomatic affairs where spectators could look on but not participate, these meetings have evolved into a more intricate social and political environment where non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like the Sierra Club can have a real impact. In addition to delegations from nearly 200 countries, there will be 10,000 observers and participants in the official meetings, the side meetings, and the semi-official and completely autonomous events being held all over downtown Montreal. Part of the game is learning the jargon of these meetings – like NGO, COP, MOP, and so on. It’s a peculiar creole of UN diplomatic parlance and the scientific lingo of climate research. Sort of like the intermixture of French and English here in Montreal. Mais oui for sure! But much of the value here, no matter how the formal proceedings turn out, is in the cross-mixture of people, many of whom will never go into the formal proceedings, but who have gathered to exchange information and build contact networks to strengthen our worldwide effort to address this most pervasive challenge. The Sierra Club (US) and the Sierra Club of/du Canada have joined forces for these matters, both inside and outside the convention(al) halls. Over 50 of us are credentialed observers of the formal meeting, but many more are involved, as you’ll read in the days to come. -- Fred Huette, Global Warming & Energy Committee Up to Top |
At the joint U.S./Canada press conference, led by my counterpart in Canada,
Amelia, we backed up our words with the physical embodiment of the leadership:
Seattle Mayor Nickels, Steelworkers David Foster, and Interface's Ray Anderson.
Listen to their stories yourselves on these 
Is
this a dream? Well sort of. It wasn't the same U.S. delegation that is objecting
to words like "dialogue" in even the weakest proposals for moving forward on
climate change. No, these encouraging words came from officials from California
-- which on the global scale of things is the eighth-largest economy in the
world, on a par with France.