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COPENHAGEN — Seven countries, led by the tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, this morning declined to accept the Copenhagen Accord that was reached late last night. But in a procedural move designed to put the agreement into effect, the conference decided to “take note” of the accord instead of formally approving it.
Photo: J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue
NGO experts explained that the decision by the other nations who are parties to the conference to “take note” enables the accord to become what the United States and other supporting nations call “operational,” even though it has not gained formal United Nations approval.

Negotiators continued to work  to clean up last details but the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference appeared as though it would conclude later today.

The final stages of the Copenhagen climate conference have produced a range of responses, though none were expressions of celebration. Ban ki-Moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, called the accord reached last night “hopeful” and urged the 193 nations that gathered here to transform its basic provisions into a legally binding treaty. “It’s just a beginning. It will take more than this to tackle climate change. It is a step in the right direction,” he said.

The UN secretary general said he would press world leaders to complete a legally binding treaty next year. Supporters of the Copenhagen Accord have until January 31, 2010 to announce their commitments to cut emissions.

Summed up, perhaps, the Copenhagen Accord is tantamount to a global prenup. The marriage agreement is still to come.
Download Copenhagen Accord, “taken note” by UNFCCC on December 19, 2009
Negotiated by U.S. President
The Copenhagen Accord was negotiated by President Obama, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, and the leaders of Brazil, India, and South Africa. It attracted support from the European Union and most other world leaders. Though the accord encompassed all of the significant measures that most nations said were needed to respond to climate change. But it includes steps that many climate scientists and diplomats consider insufficient to keep global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius, a level thought by many world leaders to be manageable.

The Copenhagen Accord contains these provisions that President Obama called a start to global action to solve climate change:

1. A commitment by developed nations to invest $30 billion over the next three years to help developing nations adapt to climate change and pursue clean energy development.

2. A provisional commitment by developed nation to develop a long-term $100 billion global fund by 2020 to assist developing nations respond to climate change and become part of the clean energy economic transition.

3. Establishing a goal to pursue emissions reductions that are sufficient to keep the rise in global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius.

4. Pledges by nations to commit to concrete emissions reductions, though the specific levels of reduction were not set.

5. A general goal to subject participating countries to international review of their progress under the accord.

6. Providing diplomatic space for the United States and China to work together to solve climate change.

7. A commitment to complete an assessment of the effectiveness of the accord in reducing emissions by the end of 2015.

8. Measures to conserve the world’s forests.

Night of Controversy
The events leading up to making the accord operational followed a long night of controversy in which Tuvalu, Sudan, Venezuela, Cuba, and three other nations opposed its provisions, arguing that it did not go nearly far enough to solve the climate crisis. The smaller nations also objected to the process that produced the accord, in which the United States, China, India, Brazil and South Africa negotiated with 20 other nations. President Obama, who arrived early on Friday morning, put the full measure of his influence and prestige behind the work to reach the accord.

Critics of the accord called it completely inadequate to respond to the dire threat posed by climate change. Cuban delegates accused the United States and its new president of “behaving like an emperor” and claimed that the draft was a “gross violation principle of sovereign equality.”

At 10:30 p.m. Obama held a news conference and appeared visibly spent. “Today we’ve made a meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough here in Copenhagen,” he said. “For the first time in history all major economies have come together to accept their responsibility to take action to confront the threat of climate change.”

The president added: “Because of the actions we’re taking we came here to Copenhagen with an ambitious target to reduce our emissions. We agreed to join an international effort to provide financing to help developing countries, particularly the poorest and most vulnerable, adapt to climate change. And we reaffirmed the necessity of listing our national actions and commitments in a transparent way.

“These three components — transparency, mitigation and finance — form the basis of the common approach that the United States and our partners embraced here in Copenhagen. Throughout the day we worked with many countries to establish a new consensus around these three points, a consensus that will serve as a foundation for global action to confront the threat of climate change for years to come.”

Dramatic Turns Over Last 30 Hours
What a final 30 hours its been here in Copenhagen. For much of the afternoon yesterday and well into the evening the cold and dark seemed to settle more deeply today on this city of 1.2 million. Here in the Bella Center, as the day turned to night without an agreement to cool the planet that most people expected today, the meditation and prayer rooms were noticeably more busy. After months of work this year, and 12 days of negotiation at the UN Climate Change Conference, it looked for much of the day as if 120 heads of state might actually leave Denmark without any agreement at all. Certainly there are fossil fuel industry board rooms in Houston where such an outcome would be celebrated.

But less than two hours before midnight word circulated through Bella that agreement had been struck, though the significance of the various measures is not, at this writing, crystal clear. The final text, negotiated by the United States, China, India, and South Africa has not been completed, though negotiators were assigned by heads of state to complete that task tonight.

NGO climate experts also cautioned that the agreement has not been made final, and that many other countries have not signed off on its provisions. The European Union, which scheduled a news conference before midnight, abruptly cancelled the event, and then held it later in the night. And just after midnight Lumumba Di-Aping, the Sudanese chair of the G77, the international alliance of developing nations, held a news conference and lashed the deal.

Fierce Criticism
Di-Aping said the agreement would hurt developing nations and “lock people of the developing world in poverty.” He said the financial terms, $10 billion annually provided by developed nations to developing nations each year through 2012, “was nothing compared to the risks.” And he accused the United States, with the assistance of Denmark, of essentially strong arming poor nations into accepting the measure. Di-Aping indicated that “if one country doesn’t agree to this agreement, then there is no deal.”

According to American NGO experts and President Obama the deal reached by the United States and the four  other nations aims at 1) limiting carbon emissions so that global temperatures do not exceed 2 degrees Celsius, 2) committing nations to concrete emissions targets, and 3) subject participating countries to international analysis of their commitments. In its essence, the agreement’s structure is consistent with what President Obama outlined to heads of state and delegates early this afternoon.

It also is the first agreement to provide diplomatic space for the United States and China to work together to tackle global climate change.

The deal is not legally binding, though the president said it was a “first step” toward developing a much stronger binding agreement. He did not say when that might occur, and wasn’t clear tonight whether negotiating a legally binding treaty was possible within a year. “I am supportive of such efforts,” he said. “This is a classic example of how if we just waited for that then we would not make any progress.”

Representatives of international climate advocacy organizations were critical of the deal, asserting that it was not nearly strong enough. Ricken Patel, executive director of Avaaz.org, greeted the deal this way: “The so-called Copenhagen Accord is an historic failure, representing the collapse of international efforts to sign a binding global treaty that can stop catastrophic climate change. Perhaps most telling, while leaders themselves recognize that this agreement is insufficient, they have set no deadline or even date to complete it.”

American NGOs Supportive
American environmental leaders were more supportive, asserting the agreement was a step that strengthened American and global action to limit carbon emissions and accelerate the vast economic transition built on a new foundation of clean energy development.

“The world’s nations have come together and concluded a historic—if incomplete—agreement to begin tackling global warming,” said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. “Tonight’s announcement is but a first step and much work remains to be done in the days and months ahead in order to seal a final international climate deal that is fair, binding, and ambitious. It is imperative that negotiations resume as soon as possible.”

“Today’s agreement takes the first important steps toward true transparency and accountability in an international climate agreement,” said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund. “The sooner the U.S. speaks through Senate legislation, the sooner we can set the terms of engagement for talks to come.”

President Obama avoided being specific about a timetable for making the agreement more robust and binding. “We strive for more binding agreements over time,” said the president.

“This is going to be hard,” added the president, who indicated he would leave Copenhagen immediately. “It’s going to be hard within countries and it’s going to be hard between countries.”

Keith Schneider, an environmental journalist, is media and communications director at the US Climate Action Network. Reach him at kschneider@climatenetwork.org

COPENHAGEN — On the day that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton showed up to the United Nations climate conference to say that the U.S. would contribute to a global clean energy and climate action fund that could grow to $100 billion by 2020, Senator James Inhofe also appeared in Copenhagen.

Earlier this month the Oklahoma Republican, one of Capitol Hill’s fiercest critics of climate action, told reporters that he would travel to Copenhagen with a “truth squad.” Its express mission: dispute climate science and disrupt the COP15 talks, which end tomorrow.

But the weight of urgency to meet tomorrow’s deadline and the intense diplomacy occurring around the clock now transformed Inhofe’s planned roar of perceived fact into a politically diminishing squeak. Briefly circled this morning by a group of reporters inside the Bella Center’s media center, Inhofe looked fidgety and uncomfortable as he accused the news media here of “being on the far left,” asserted that climate science was “debunked,” and promised that the chance of the Senate approving a proposed climate and energy bill was “zero.”

“Nothing binding will come out of here in my opinion,” Inhofe said, referring to the negotiations. “And if it does it will be rejected by the American people.”

Weak Appearance
Inhofe’s conservative allies in government and the media are certain to describe his visit as a heroic act of political principle – confront the lions of climate action in their own den and all that. But a more significant outcome of Inhofe’s three-hour Copenhagen visit could be the political consequence it may produce in Washington D.C.

The Oklahoma Republican, who steadily elevated his career to national significance – in the model of former Alabama Governor George Wallace — through calculated confrontation and rhetoric strategically calibrated to excite and inflame, miscalculated every aspect of his trip here.

The timing was wrong. The audience was not receptive. And Inhofe’s message was a blur for foreign reporters – Senate politics, hijacked emails – and old news for American journalists.

Indeed, there was real news to report. The U.S. started the day here with a surprising commitment to help finance a $100 billion climate and energy fund, the first time the country has formally recognized the magnitude of the investment needed globally. Clinton did not specify how much the U.S. would commit or its schedule, but did say that it was predicated on the Chinese allowing the world to measure and verify carbon reductions there.

The Chinese followed later in the day – no surprise — with assurances that it would be much more open and transparent in reporting progress on commitments it made last month to reduce carbon emissions.

Photo: J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue

350.org co-founder Bill McKibben spoke at the vigil, which intended to put pressure on world leaders such as U.S. President Barack Obama, who arrived for the final day of the conference.

A Day of Progress Ignores Oklahoma Senator
The climate negotiations, fraught with disagreement and slow progress for almost two weeks, seemed to open up after both announcements. NGO experts close to the delegations said the talks were starting to move with more pace. The chance that the 192 nations here would reach a deal on climate change that makes a difference came into clearer focus. In other words, there is little space today in the momentous global conversation on climate and the economy for a whiny American senator from the Great Plains.

Inhofe left Copenhagen looking weak, a little unstable, and kind of kooky. No doubt, the Congressional delegation — led by Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — that arrived here today took note.

Inhofe’s revealing performance capped a tough week for free market conservatives in Copenhagen. Early in the week several meetings on climate science and the stolen emails, including one organized by Americans For Prosperity, an activist organization financed in part by coal and oil interests, attracted audiences of less than a dozen participants. The stolen emails, flogged by Sarah Palin and the right as evidence of a conspiracy to cook the science on warming, were ignored in Copenhagen. Instead negotiators vigorously defended the scientific consensus on the causes of climate disruption and its consequences.

Oklahoma’s Favorite Son in D.C.
It’s too early to tell, of course, what effect Inhofe’s silly visit to Copenhagen will have on his standing in Washington. It’s almost certainly not going to injure his stature in Oklahoma.

Named a senator in 1994 — to replace Senator David Boren who resigned to assume the presidency of the University of Oklahoma — Inhofe has won with strong margins three times, the latest in 2008 by gaining 57 percent of the vote.

His primary financial support comes from the fossil fuel industries whose climate science-denying interests he vigorously advances. Since 2000, according to Oil Change International, the coal and oil industries have contributed $1.13 million to his campaigns. Oklahoma is the number three producer of natural gas, the number six producer of crude oil, and is home to seven big coal-fired power plants, according to the Energy Information Administration and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

And Inhofe’s role as one of President Barack Obama’s most aggressive opponents appears as secure as any in the Senate. Just 34 percent of Oklahoma’s voters supported the president in the 2008 election. Only Wyoming disapproved of the president more.

Keith Schneider, a former New York Times national correspondent, is senior editor and producer at Circle of Blue. Reach Keith at keith@circleofblue.org. Read the previous installments of Schneider’s COP15 blogging here, here, here and here. Follow Circle of Blue’s continued coverage of the Copenhagen climate talks.

COPENHAGEN—What a day here in Copenhagen. For much of the afternoon and well into the evening the cold and dark seemed to settle more deeply today on this city of 1.2 million. As morning turned to night no agreement was signed to save the planet. The meditation and prayer rooms were noticeably more busy in the Bella Center. After months of work this year, and 12 days of negotiation at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, it looked as if the 120 heads of state might actually leave Denmark without any agreement at all. Certainly there are fossil fuel industry board rooms in Houston that would celebrate such an outcome.

But less than two hours before midnight word circulated through the center that an agreement had been struck, though the significance of the various measures is not, as this writing, crystal clear. The final text, negotiated by the United States, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa has not been completed — though heads of state told negotiators to complete that task tonight.

NGO climate experts also cautioned that the agreement has not been finalized, and that many other countries have not signed off on its provisions. The European Union, which scheduled a news conference before midnight, abruptly canceled the event, then scheduled another early this morning. And just after midnight Lumumba Di-Aping, the Sudanese chair of the G77 — the international alliance of developing nations — held a news conference and lashed the deal.

Di-Aping said the agreement would hurt developing nations and “lock people of the developing world in poverty.” He said the financial terms, $10 billion annually provided by developed nations to developing nations each year through 2012, “was nothing compared to the risks.” And he accused the U.S., with the assistance of Denmark, of essentially strong arming poor nations into accepting the measure. Di-Aping indicated that “if one country doesn’t agree to this agreement, then there is no deal.”

According to American NGO experts and U.S. President Barack Obama, who held a news conference at 10:30pm, the deal reached by the four nations aims at 1) limiting carbon emissions so that global temperatures do not exceed 2 degrees Celsius, 2) committing nations to concrete emissions targets, and 3) subject participating countries to international analysis of their commitments. In its essence, the agreement’s structure is consistent with what President Obama outlined to heads of state and delegates early this afternoon.

It also is the first agreement to provide diplomatic space for the United States and China to work together to tackle global climate change. Moreover, American delegates told NGO representatives here that the G77 countries were in the room when the agreement was reached, and shouldn’t block it.

The deal is not legally binding, though the president said it was a “first step” toward developing a much stronger binding agreement. Obama did not say when that deal will happen, and he wasn’t clear tonight whether negotiating a legally binding treaty was possible within a year.

Photo: J. Carl Ganter/Circle of blue

U.S. Representative Edward Markey, who has co-authored domestic climate legislation, came to Copenhagen to reassure delegates that the U.S. will commit both locally and globally to regulating climate change.

“I am supportive of such efforts,” he said. “This is a classic example of how if we just waited for that then we would not make any progress.”

Representatives of international climate advocacy organizations were critical of the deal, asserting that it was not nearly strong enough. Ricken Patel, executive director of Avaaz.org, greeted the deal this way: “The so-called Copenhagen Accord is an historic failure, representing the collapse of international efforts to sign a binding global treaty that can stop catastrophic climate change. Perhaps most telling, while leaders themselves recognize that this agreement is insufficient, they have set no deadline or even date to complete it.”

U.S. environmental leaders were more supportive, asserting the agreement was a step that strengthened American and global action to limit carbon emissions and accelerate the vast economic transition built on a new foundation of clean energy development.

“The world’s nations have come together and concluded a historic—if incomplete—agreement to begin tackling global warming,” said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. “Tonight’s announcement is but a first step and much work remains to be done in the days and months ahead in order to seal a final international climate deal that is fair, binding, and ambitious. It is imperative that negotiations resume as soon as possible.”

“Today’s agreement takes the first important steps toward true transparency and accountability in an international climate agreement,” said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund. “The sooner the U.S. speaks through Senate legislation, the sooner we can set the terms of engagement for talks to come.”

President Obama avoided naming a specific timetable for making the agreement more robust and binding. “We strive for more binding agreements over time,” Obama said.

“This is going to be hard,” added Obama, who indicated he would leave Copenhagen immediately. “It’s going to be hard within countries and it’s going to be hard between countries.”

Keith Schneider, a former New York Times national correspondent, is senior editor and producer at Circle of Blue. Reach Keith at keith@circleofblue.org. Read the previous installments of Schneider’s COP15 blogging here, here, here, here and here. Be sure to check out all of Circle of Blue’s Copenhagen coverage, including other features and videos.

COPENHAGEN – Like all spellbinding human dramas the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which today entered its second and last week, represents the accumulated chapters of an urgent script – the fate of the planet.

Everybody in every corner of the world has a stake. Island nations, some of them starting to be swamped by rising seas, want huge cuts in climate warming gases to save their increasingly fragile economies and cultures. Arid nations already challenged by deeper and longer droughts – from the Sahel of Africa to Australia – see climate action essential to preserving their food production.

Rich nations see the advantage of a new clean energy economy that produces technology and jobs to achieve reductions in climate-changing emissions. And the small group of senators and representatives with outsize fury, expected to arrive this week from the United States to contend there is no climate change at all, have staked their reputations on disrupting the momentum for meaningful action that is building here.

A Week To Go
Still, seven days into the Copenhagen conference and with just five days to go, there is no clear consensus amongst negotiators or activists about how this momentous drama will end.

The big narratives that are converging here break down like this. Developing nations seek large cuts in carbon emissions – 30 to 45 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 – and big investments by rich nations to finance their low carbon economies. The European Union has pledged somewhat smaller reductions in emissions targets by 2020: 20 percent below 1990 levels, and 30 percent if other wealthy nations reach an agreement. The EU has indicated publicly that it is willing to spend $3 billion to $4 billion annually over the next few years to help developing nations, but it is unclear whether this is new money or simply redirected development aid.

Japan’s new Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said earlier this year that his country’s emission reduction target is 25 percent below 1990 levels and the country is willing to invest substantially in a global fund for developing nations.

But arguably the biggest story is what the rest of the world will do here with the clear positions made public by the United States.

Only two U.S. numbers really make a difference.

Targets and Audiences
The first is “in the range of 17 percent” below 2005 levels, which is how much carbon the Obama administration says it will agree to remove from U.S. emissions by 2020. The second is $1.4 billion annually, which is how much the United States indicates it is willing to contribute over the next few years to a global climate change fund for developing nations.

The president and his lead negotiators in Copenhagen, Todd Stern and Jonathan Pershing, have made clear there is not much room to move either number up. In order for the U.S. to stay in the final agreement, the climate pact must incorporate emissions and finance targets close to what the U.S. says it will accept.

Or is there wriggle room? This week the Energy Information Administration, a unit of the Department of the Energy, is expected to announce that U.S. emissions dropped eight percent last year. Last week Environment America published a report that found state climate change policies alone will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 536 million metric tons by 2020, about seven percent of United States 2007 emissions. The two studies could put pressure on the administration to increase its emissions pledge.

Though many nations and writers disagree, from the perspective of a journalist who’s written extensively for years about environmental politics and economics, the American commitment to rolling back carbon emissions represents a momentous political achievement for the administration. If it happens here, and there is still no assurance that it will, it nevertheless would be the start of the U.S. transformation to a clean energy economy and a renewal of the country’s traditional role as a leader in responding to a global environmental threat

Still, the U.S. commitment to reducing carbon “in the range of 17 percent” is nowhere close to what needs to be done, according to the science of warming – but, it’s a start. And because of that the pressure from developing nations may prompt the U.S. to commit to a bit larger target – say 20 percent reductions below 2005 levels, the same target contained in a climate and clean energy proposal under consideration in the Senate. Or the U.S. can commit more money. But Obama aides have made clear the increases will not be much more.

On long-term targets, the proposed U.S. cut in emissions are 80 percent by 2050, which is consistent with what scientists say is necessary over the long run to keep global average temperatures below two degrees Celsius.

Photo by J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue

Chilly demonstrators from 350.org strip to their underwear to greet the press and delegates at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen. Creative protest and messaging provide the back-and-forth drama, conversation and wry humor throughout the talks which are bringing more than 100 heads of state and tens of thousands of negotiators, media and students to the Bella Center outside of this Danish city.

The largely peaceful march on Saturday, attended by 60,000 to 100,000 people according to several estimates, is one more piece of the cultural and political saga that has unfolded here. While the global mainstream media focused on the 968 people who were detained by police, and barely noted that just 19 were held for investigation, the message of the march was received loud and clear inside the Bella Center. The world is calling for more aggressive action than the U.S. is close to considering.

There are other players in this drama that could also alter how the U.S. approaches the conference’s final day. While most of the attention here is focused on the emissions pledges of large developed countries, developing countries have pledged their own actions to reduce carbon. The Obama administration must be able to demonstrate to its domestic political opponents that U.S. climate action here will not put American industry at an economic disadvantage with the large emerging economies – most notably China.

So here is what the breakthrough moment is shaping up to be at the Copenhagen conference — whether the world will accept the U.S. targets. If the world insists that Obama bring more ambitious targets and greater financing, the U.S. has given every indication that it would not be able to accept this new agreement.

Charm Offensive
Obama and his aides have launched a focused message campaign here to avoid that possibility. The administration established a U.S. Center, which has hosted cabinet secretaries and other top aides to talk about all that the United States is doing to combat climate change and accelerate the clean energy economy. Energy Secretary Steven Chu will be at the center Today. The Obama administration is also making it plain here in public and private conversations that the president is fighting a ferocious counter attack from the fossil fuel industry and the allies it has funded in the Senate and House.

The aim of the charm offensive is to help delegates and NGO staffers absorb the lessons from what President Obama has achieved this year – from enacting a recovery bill in February that contains $110 billion for clean energy practices and technology, to deciding this month to regulate carbon dioxide as a threat to health under the Clean Air Act.

If Obama is successful in making this case and leveraging his ample storehouse of global goodwill the last chapter of the UN Climate Change Conference could also be the first scene of a new era in diplomacy, science and economics. The final chapter here could produce an international agreement that includes the U.S. and contains clear steps and a finance plan to cool the planet and heat up the global economy.

Keith Schneider, a former New York Times national correspondent, is senior editor and producer at Circle of Blue. Reach Keith at keith@circleofblue.org. Read the previous installments of Schneider’s COP15 blogging here, here and here. Stay tuned for more of Circle of Blue’s COP15 coverage all this and next week.

COPENHAGEN – Great social movements are about the intelligence and vision of individuals, and the compelling strength of crowds. Both have been in abundance throughout the first week of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, and especially today.

Wearing polar bear costumes, red suits and dark glasses, black jeans and matching black t-shirts, and carrying a multitude of colorful signs aimed at speeding the pace of negotiations and results – “Bla, Bla, Bla. Act Now,” “There Is No Planet B,” “The World Wants A Real Deal” – tens of thousands of people crowded into Parliament Square for a rally this afternoon, and thousands more joined them for a 4-mile march to the Bella Center to present negotiators with demands as potent as their numbers.

The swelling crowd, variously estimated by the police and organizers as measuring between 60,000 and 100,000, was peaceful, insistent and cold. Temperatures were just above freezing, and a wind tugged at upturned collars. Those in attendance wore pins, badges and carried banners indicating they came from all over the world.

Ride From Australia
One demonstrator, Kim Nuygen, said he took 16 months to bike here from Australia. Most of those who attended today were young. A trio from Paris said they’d come to organize a film festival that launches next week and features former Vice President Al Gore. A group of students from the University of Michigan said they wanted to see how theories of dispute resolution, climate science and chemical engineering actually worked when subject to the vagaries of political ideology and social differences. Their conclusion: It ain’t pretty.

“I’d like to think that something good will come out of the next week,” said Aubrey Parker, a University of Michigan student who was raised in the Traverse City region. “But I’m a little pessimistic. There’s a lot of bureaucracy. A lot of countries have come here with plans that are not progressive enough.”

Marcia Lee, a 27-year-old graduate student studying dispute resolution at Marquette University, in Wisconsin, said, “I really wanted to see how negotiations work on the international scale. I just wanted to gather people’s stories and learn and understand what really breaks peoples hearts. If we can reach that heart level it is possible to start the conversation of how to heal that broken heart.”

When pressed about what she meant, Lee said: “There are four elements that everybody needs: The need to love and to be loved. The need to belong, and to be of use. If we can reach people at that level then a lot of things that separate us are changed. There is a lot of overlap to being human.”

More Around The World
The Global Day of Action here coincided with thousands of other gatherings of climate activists around the world. Five thousand people demonstrated in New Delhi. Paris decorated its North Station yesterday and dispatched the Climate Express, which carried hundreds of people to join demonstrators in Copenhagen. Tweets from Melbourne reported that 50,000 people attended the climate demonstration there.

The purpose of the Copenhagen rally, march and candlelight vigil with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, which ended the day, was to amplify that essential sense that young people brought here — the idea that there must be a better way. They also provided mass to the individual voices of concern that have made the planet’s changing climate the signature issue of this generation. Speakers at the large and noisy rally pointed out time and again there is a vast difference in perception and language between those marching today, and those inside the Bella Center, where negotiators from 192 nations are racing to reach an agreement by the December 18 deadline.

The Heart vs. The Numbers
Inside, for the most part, the ornate language of diplomacy joins with complex science to set an often confusing table for talking about numbers. There are differing views among delegates about how much carbon should be removed from the emissions of industrial and non-industrial nations; 20 percent? 40 percent? 0 percent? And when: 10 years? 25 years? 50 years? How much should be invested to do that: $10 billion annually; $195 billion annually within a decade? How many acres of forest need to be preserved? How should uses of land change? And can the world hold the level of warming to 2 degrees Celsius — an increased viewed by many here as manageable, or will the climate shift be 4 degrees or will it reach a level by the end of the century that threatens the species?

Outside, in the streets of Copenhagen, the words and phrases shouted through loudspeakers and in the mix of song and music carried in the wind was of people facing urgent consequences of climate change, and calls for an end to delay. A woman from Ghana opened the rally with a story of how her village, economically robust at the start of the decade, and easily able to feed itself, has been under siege in recent years by killing floods that gave rise to plagues of mosquitoes. The two growing seasons that used to exist have been cut in half to an uncertain one. After the floods came droughts and then floods and erosion and an end to bountiful harvests. Sickness has brought unexpected deaths. She blamed the fluky weather and its sober consequences on climate change. Not once did she use a number to describe the compelling misfortune of her family and her village.

Photo by J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue

Vigil and a Plea Heard Globally
The plaintive and plain spoken messages seem to be heard inside the Bella Center. The march today concluded outside the center’s doors with a vigil. Sails that demonstrators carried from Parliament Square were ceremoniously handed to Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and one of the conference’s key organizers.

Early in the week, Tuvalu, the tiny Pacific Island nation of 12,000 residents, three of whom are here as climate negotiators, raised its voice to insist on faster action on climate that was legally binding for all nations. The proceedings slowed considerably, but did not stop, as the issues raised by a nation that lies four feet above sea level and understands that its fate will be determined by what happens in Copenhagen.

Indeed, the competition is fierce between developing nations that are the first to confront the immediacy of climate change, and the industrial nations that have varying levels of conviction about the consequences. Negotiators found a way later in the week to work through Tuvalu’s concern, and draft texts of a final agreement were circulated on Friday that were greeted favorably by many nations. Environment ministers are arriving this weekend to carry the negotiations closer to a final agreement next week, and the UNFCC is telling NGO representatives that a number of heads of state are planning to arrive days earlier than planned.

That is an indication of the anticipation building here that something worthwhile will come out of these two weeks in December. The Bella Center itself has gotten so jammed that its capacity of 15,000 people is close to being exceeded. The UNFCCC yesterday alerted participants that it will initiate a new system of issuing what it called “secondary cards” to keep the packed center from being too full. The new badging requirement will take effect on Tuesday.

“Fate of My Country”
As demonstrators and negotiators converged at the Bella Center at the march’s end today, the text was made public of a dramatic statement in the plenary session early in the week by one of Tuvalu’s diplomats. Circulated by NGO groups and among the young people reading on their cell phones, the clear-headed plea for action by one man from a little-known nation reflected the will of many of those who’ve come to Copenhagen.

“This is not just an issue of Tuvalu,” the diplomat wrote. “Millions of people around the world are affected. Over the last few days I’ve received calls from all over the world offering faith and hope that we can reach a conclusion on this issue.”

“Madame President, this is not a media trip for me. I have refused to take media calls on this issue. As a humble servant of the government of Tuvalu, I have to make a strong appeal to you that we consider this matter properly,” his statement read.

“I woke this morning. I was crying. That’s not easy for a grown man to admit. The fate of my country rests in your hands.”

Keith Schneider, a former New York Times national correspondent, is senior editor and producer at Circle of Blue. Reach Keith at keith@circleofblue.org. Read the two previous installments of Schneider’s COP15 blogging here and here. Stay tuned for more of Circle of Blue’s COP15 coverage all this and next week.

Photo: J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue

Early morning metro riders in Copenhagen are greeted at every train stop by signs about climate change. Even the backs and sides of the city’s buses adorn messages of alternative energies and global warming.

By Keith Schneider
Circle of Blue

COPENHAGEN — Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, pushed through a crush of visitors at the U.S. Center late this morning, stepped to the podium in front of a packed meeting room, and became the first of President Obama’s senior advisors to appear at the UN Climate Change Conference specifically to make the case that the United States is assuming its share of the global burden to cool the planet.

Whether delegates from 191 other nations represented here, and thousands of activists and journalists who’ve joined them in Copenhagen, will be convinced is not at all clear.

Conference organizers and delegates worried today that developing nations might walk out of the proceedings, a decision that would be spurred, at least in part, by assertions from poor countries that rich nations are not doing enough to combat climate change.

Jackson’s appearance will be followed over the next week by the secretaries of Interior, Commerce, Energy, Agriculture and the president himself. All will speak from a script about the Obama administration’s work this year to shift the federal government’s work on climate change from Bush-era denial to focused activism. The new administration narrative, much of it to be staged at the 6,500-square-foot U.S. Center, is aimed at convincing the world that a new reckoning with the planet’s dire climate situation is at hand. Said Jackson: “2009 cements the place in history when the United States seized the challenge of dealing with greenhouse gas pollution. “

Different Than Bush
There is no argument, by the administration’s supporters and its most vociferous critics, that when it comes to a focused response to warming temperatures and increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the U.S. has vastly improved its game. The persistent rumble of discontent at these talks, and others in the last year, is whether it’s enough.

A lot of nations say it’s not. A number of American NGO staffers agree. The Obama administration, at war with the fossil industry and its allies in Congress, says it’s doing everything in its power to negotiate a climate deal here that has authentic merit.

The mission for Jackson here today, and for the colleagues that follow her, is to break through the doubts. In her brief remarks, she took note of the progression of the EPA and the Obama administration’s actions to reduce climate-changing air emissions since the inauguration.

Last month, for instance, the president announced that the U.S. was prepared to make a commitment here to a reduction in greenhouse emissions in the “range of 17 percent” below 2005 levels, the first time the U.S. has issued such targets. Earlier this year Jackson and her agency issued new vehicle emissions and efficiency standards, and a new rule requiring large polluters to report their greenhouse gas emissions. In February, the president signed the economic recovery bill that included – depending on how you count — $80 billion to $110 billion for climate gas-reducing clean energy technology, energy efficiency, public transit, and research investments.

And on Monday, on the same day that the climate conference opened, the EPA issued a formal finding that carbon dioxide and five other compounds endanger public health and safety. The so-called “endangerment” finding, which was mandated by a 2007 Supreme Court decision, clears the way for Jackson and her agency to begin regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

Conference Presence Updated

Photo: J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue

World champion extreme skier Alison Gannett carries her skis around the Bella Center at the United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen. Gannett also serves as president of the Save our Snow Foundation and travels the world to raise awareness of melting glaciers.

There’s also little argument that the American approach to this conference – visible, aggressive, and reliant on the administration’s political star power — also differs significantly from the previous global negotiations over the last year in places like Bonn and Barcelona.

In those talks, the U.S. seemed continually on the defensive. In Barcelona, where climate negotiators gathered in late October, the U.S. was greeted by serious challenge from big and small nations, rich and poor, about its refusal to set targets on emissions and financial contributions to developing countries. The early days of that negotiation were marked by some predictions that the US position might push the talks to collapse.

Jonathan Pershing, the deputy special envoy for climate change and the chief U.S. negotiator, tried to explain that the Obama administration was reluctant to repeat the ordeal of 1997, when the Clinton administration signed the Kyoto Protocol to limit emissions, but encountered such stiff resistance in the Senate that the treaty was never submitted for a vote. Delegates from other nations scoffed, saying Pershing’s defense of the administration’s decision to withhold those two crucial numbers – emissions limits and financial investment — was a matter of internal domestic politics that the U.S. needed to resolve, just like any other nation.

In Washington, A Battle Over Climate
The ideological battle over clean energy and climate change has only gotten more nasty. Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic Majority Leader, put off debate and a vote on a proposed Senate version of climate and clean energy bill until the spring. And a manufactured scandal by opponents to climate action, involving email messages stolen from an English climate research group, has energized allies of the fossil fuel industry in and outside government, and reached the doorsteps of the Bella Center, where the climate conference is being held.

But in the weeks since the Barcelona negotiations, the administration has unfurled the results of the months of private climate negotiations that the president and his aides have undertaken with U.S. allies. The president met with the leaders of China and India this fall. After the president announced the American emissions target, China and India announced new targets of their own, the first time that has occurred.

The White House also announced that the U.S. had established the U.S. Center at the Copenhagen Conference. Along with the cabinet secretaries scheduled to speak here Carol Browner, the coordinator of energy and climate policy, and Nancy Sutley, the chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, will also make high-profile presentations.

U.S. Center Planned A Year Ago
A senior State Department official who participated in planning the U.S. Center, who asked not to be identified, confirmed that the U.S. Center was a center piece of the American marketing strategy, developed at the start of the year, to change how the administration and the country are viewed at climate conferences.

The official did not say when the administration decided to showcase its top energy, environment, and natural resources officials here. But the planning appears to have coincided with the president’s own decision to attend the Copenhagen conference, which he originally scheduled for tomorrow, and then rescheduled to December 18, the conference’s last day. President Obama will be one of 110 heads of state that are now expected to attend the conference, according to the United Nations conference organizers.

Yesterday, according to participants, Jackson received a standing ovation when she was introduced at a private meeting with American NGO activists. US delegation members said they anticipate President Obama also will be warmly embraced here. Very clearly, judging by the bounce in the steps of lower-level officials who’ve appeared at the U.S. Center, the president will be greeted by an energized staff that no longer feels like it needs to defend the American position on the deteriorating climate.

Keith Schneider, a former New York Times national correspondent, is senior editor and producer at Circle of Blue. Reach Keith at keith@circleofblue.org. Read the first installment of Schneider’s COP15 blogging here. Stay tuned for more of Circle of Blue’s COP15 coverage all this and next week.

COPENHAGEN – Among the hundreds of riders on this city’s automated, energy-efficient Metro rapid transit system was Isakwisa Mwamukonda, an environmental policy manager for the vice president of Tanzania. We had half a dozen stops between the tight-cornered streets of Copenhagen’s downtown and the Bella Center, site of the UN Climate Change Conference, to explore the promise as well as the perils of a global negotiation that almost everybody here hopes will achieve a new climate agreement that truly makes a difference.

Yet what Mwamukonda said was especially dismaying was not the big differences between the US and the EU over cutting emissions, or how much of the world’s rain forests to conserve, or the level of investment by developed nations to help developing nations make the transition to a low-carbon economy. All of that and much more will need to be resolved for the 12-day conference to close on its goal of being a historically significant gathering.

“You’ve heard of Kilimanjaro?” Mwamukundo asked, folding his hands in his lap. “The ice is melting. It won’t be there in a few years. The animals are dying from drought. Our land is changing. How can anybody doubt that climate change is real?”

Undercurrent at Opening
The sound of a lone trumpet and a chorus of young Danes opened the 15th Conference of the Parties this morning at the enormous, O’Hare-size Bella Center. But the insistent soundtrack that also greeted negotiators from 192 nations, and thousands of reporters and climate activists from around the world, was the purposefully disruptive noise of opponents claiming the conference’s goal is premised on a scientific hoax.

There’s nothing new about the argument, of course. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary there are still people who insist the holocaust never occurred, the world was created 6,000 years ago, and George Bush was a great president.

But the digital break-in at the climate research unit at the University of East Anglia, in England, and the worldwide release last month of unguarded email exchanges among climate scientists has stirred an undercurrent among those gathered here that covers all of the emotional ground marked by indignation at one end and fury at the other. In other words the thousands of people who came to Copenhagen to address the important disagreements over the final text of the climate accord, many of whom devoted sizable chunks of their lives to actually delivering a breakthrough moment in how the world conducts its affairs, are pissed off.

As the Union of Concerned Scientists, the White House science advisor, and dozens of leading climate scientists have pointed out the thieved messages offer insight into scientific candor but they do not call into question the sound scientific consensus that has been reached about the causes of climate change and its consequences. The U.S. Center at Copenhagen, established by the Obama administration to showcase American research and federal actions to limit greenhouse gases, is holding a series of briefings throughout the next two weeks that explore the many scientifically peer-reviewed dimensions of the climate crisis.

Scientific Response
James McCarthy, a former lead author on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sent a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer today that articulated the scientific view that the stolen e-mails have no bearing on the overall understanding of climate science. “The scientific process depends on open access to methodology, data, and a rigorous peer-review process,” wrote Dr. McCarthy, who is board chair of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The robust exchange of ideas in the peer-reviewed literature regarding climate science is evidence of the high degree of integrity in this process. The body of evidence that human activity is prominent agent in global warming is overwhelming. The content of these a few personal emails has no impact what-so-ever on our overall understanding that human activity is driving dangerous levels of global warming.”

The National Wildlife Federation issued a news release that included these facts about climate change:
• Temperatures this decade have been higher than any other decade on record, and one degree Fahrenheit higher than average temperatures in the 20th century. Source: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Surface Temperature Analysis. Available at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/.
• Ocean temperatures worldwide this summer were hotter than ever previously recorded. Source: NOAA National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), State of the Climate reports for June, July, and August 2009. Available at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/.
• Stable sea ice in the Arctic melted to its lowest recorded levels this summer, declining more than 60% since the 1980s and 1990s. Source: National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at http://nsidc.org/news/press/20091005_minimumpr.html.
• Carbon Dioxide levels in the atmosphere for 2009 (387 parts per million) are the highest they have been in about 15 million years. Source: NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) Mauna Loa Observatory. Available at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/.
• Globally, 8.7 billion tons of carbon were emitted in 2008 from burning coal, oil and natural gas, a 41 percent increase from 1990. Source: Le Quéré, L., et al., 2009. Trends in the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide. Nature Geoscience. Nov. 17. 2009.

Misbehavior and Deceit
What the email messages do call into question is the misbehavior and deceit of the opponents to climate action. It is still not known, though British authorities have launched an investigation, who broke into the university’s cache and who financed the theft and dissemination of the messages. Gaining those two facts will shed important light on what this episode was all about.

And while reporters parse, and climate critics cherry pick the significance of a handful of phrases contained in thousands of messages, the leaders of the view that climate change is a fraud are advancing a scientifically silly new narrative that posits the planet is cooling, polar bears are experiencing a population explosion, and the researchers who won a Nobel two years ago for their work to understand the chemistry and physics of climate science don’t know what they are talking about.

The objective of this campaign of deceit is now clear. Those who executed the break-in, timed the email release to coincide with the start of the Copenhagen conference, and recruited attention to the cherry-picked phrases want to tighten the comfort zone for global leaders and negotiators here. Big decisions about energy, the environment, and the economy are on the table. Amid all of the uncertainty about taking momentous steps to accelerate the energy, climate, and economic transition that has already begun worldwide, national leaders at least felt secure about the quality of the scientific foundations of their decisions.

Isakwisa Mwamukonda said this morning that African nations are confident that the science of climate change confirms what their eyes already tell them. The same is true for negotiators from other nations. Jonathan Pershing, the United States deputy special envoy for Climate Change, told a news conference this afternoon that the email theft “will have virtually no effect at all” on the negotiations and will be seen as a “small blip” in the history of the world’s work to solve global warming.

Still, there may be some small measure of value to negotiators that come from the stolen emails. The episode seems to be temporarily expanding the space negotiators need — especially those from the U.S — to test proposals, exchange draft text, and refine ideas without worrying about leading today’s news broadcasts. Moreover, the story here — again, at least temporarily — is not whether the U.S. position could lead to a collapse of the talks.

Keith Schneider, a former New York Times national correspondent, is senior editor and producer at Circle of Blue. Reach Keith at keith@circleofblue.org. Stay tuned for more of Circle of Blue’s COP15 coverage all this and next week.