It\’s Getting Hot In Here

Cross-posted from theClimateers.org.

UN negotiators from Annex I (developed) countries have been working to push through text on Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) by the end of the Bonn negotiations on Friday, June 11. The draft text, however, creates several loopholes that allow developed countries to effectively hide emissions from land use as if they do not exist. By forcing through the text without removing these loopholes, developed countries would be allowed to emit millions of tons of new carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions without accounting for them. This would lead to a major deviation from emissions reductions demanded by science and would have catastrophic consequences for developing countries and future generations. International youth observers at the UN conference responded to the threat of the text being finalized with these disastrous loopholes by launching a campaign to alert negotiators to the irresponsibility and unacceptability of such a decision for young and future generations.

To begin the campaign on Tuesday morning, we greeted negotiators arriving for the day with a hide-and-seek game between youth dressed up as greenhouse gas emissions and inept emissions accountants unable to find them for lack of trying. The 12 of us dressed up as tonnes of greenhouse gases and hid behind trees and camoflauged themselves with twigs outside the conference center as negotiators arrived. Meanwhile, two fumbling accountants attempted half-heartedly to find and enter the hidden emissions into the books while engaging delegates to explain their inability to find the emissions, often in plain sight, given the problematic rules in the current text that make accounting voluntary. Continue reading ‘International Youth at UNFCCC Call out Emissions Loopholes in Forestry Text’

Cross-posted from theClimateers.org.

Youth Energy Reverberating during COP Prep

Many of us who were at the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen from December 7-19 went through a period of hibernation in week following the conference. I, for one, slept for more than 32 hours in the 48 hours that began at 12:00 p.m. on December 20th. I’d been burning the midnight oil for fifteen straight days at that point, constantly jumping from one task to the next throughout the 18-hour workdays. It was actually no great hardship to sustain such working hours during the conference; the bubble that we lived in – that of the UN conference and, more so, that of our own international youth climate movement within the conference – was teeming with energy. We fed off the energy, passion, intellect and creativity of one another to make up for lack of sleep or caloric intake.

This is nothing new. Our movement and social movements in general have acquired great strength from the way inspiration bounces around from activist to activist, sparking or re-igniting motivation. But to experience this at COP-15 in a tiny microcosm of the greater movement was eye-opening for me, particularly in the final hours as we walked away from the negotiations without the fair, ambitious, and legally binding treaty that we’d been pushing so hard for.

A fitting and galvanizing quotation just came through on my Twitterfeed: “Many of the great achievements of the world were accomplished by tired and discouraged people who kept on working.”

While I believe it to be true that we can trudge through the lowest of lows and achieve great highs, I know it is a difficult task. Some of the farewell conversations I had with brilliant, effective young activists in Copenhagen were filled with a such a preponderance of negative emotion that, at least in the initial shock of the blow taken at the end of the negotiations, these new friends seemed to be leaving with a debilitating sense of defeat. Continue reading ‘Re-Powering the Movement: To Healthy Growth in 2010′