Stop Climate Chaos Scotland @ Cop15

DAY Twelve - by Dr Richard Dixon.
Friday 18th December 2009

Yesterday only 300 NGO people were allowed into the Bella Center. Several NGOs tried to sit in overnight. The last two WWF people were extracted from their hiding place in the gent’s loos around 5am.

I spent the day elsewhere, first in an office WWF had been lent and then in the evening in an ex-cattle market which is now an art gallery and meeting space. When I arrived it was lit only with candles and people were singing songs about the planet. It got a bit more business like but the internet kept breaking.

As well as trying to keep track of the huge email traffic from people inside the Bella Center and out, I spent several hours watching the webcasts of the speeches by world leaders, watching for anything significant I should report to our network.

There were some interesting bits, like the Prime Minister of Malaysia suggesting an astronomical annual sum of funding needed by developing countries, Israel’s commitments to electric vehicles and Bolivia’s President Morales telling us that capitalism is the greatest enemy of humankind. But mostly it was a deathly dull list of minor initiatives and a catalogue of the impacts of climate change on their country.

There is still a very long way to go in the main talks but things are looking brighter than 24 hours ago, with new promises from the US on long-term finance, some movement from China on international monitoring, people actually making progress on the agreement texts and the possibility of the EU moving to a 30% target during the night.

In answer to a press question, Yvo de Boer revealed that he had booked his hotel room until Sunday morning but people are beginning to speculate that the involvement of the heads of state means that the conference can’t do the usual trick of going on through Saturday night and might really finish as advertised today. There could be 8 hours or 24 hours left to save the planet. It could make a big difference which one it is.