Author: Keith Schneider

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 …

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,” …

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 …

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 …