“It was a roller coaster ride,” admitted Yvo de Boer, the U.N.’s top climate-change negotiator and ringmaster of a show that P.T. Barnum would have admired. Within a 12-hour period on the final day, there was a deal, then there wasn’t a deal, then there was a deal. And then, after the majority of NGOs and most of the press were on planes back home, the UN delegates pulled a last-minute stunt, blocking the acceptance of  the document known as the Copenhagen Accord. A small group of world leaders from the U.S., Japan, the EU, China, India, and Brazil flew in to edit and revise the accord, which the U.N. then debated. The debate went on, and on, and on. Some media reported that a deal had been reached, packed their bags and went home.

But a snag remained. African nations were not happy with the accord and, with only a few journalists in the press room, they launched a series of moves designed to get the accord off of the table. Finally, at around 6 a.m., after an all-nighter, the Danish Prime Minister announced that the UN could not “adopt” the accord.

A break was called, and when it became clear that, although nobody liked the accord, nobody wanted to walk away from an agreement, the session resumed. The chair said publicly that the conference “would take note of” the accord, applause broke out, and that was that. But when Ban Ki Moon then said the accord was “adopted”, there was confusion. The accord is a non-binding legal agreement. Can it be adopted? What’s the difference between taking note of and adopting, in the UN legal sense of the word? De Boer didn’t really clear things up at the final press conference (he was asked twice about “adopt” versus “take note of”‘), at first saying that it didn’t matter, but then finally admitting that the accord was simply in front of people, and that’s what “take note of” meant. At least in this case.
What it really means, as China noted, is that this is purely a voluntary agreement that doesn’t really force anybody to anything. The most  important thing, de Boer noted, was to now turn it into a legal instrument, an effort likely to prove impossible.
So, is that it? Was it all a waste of time, effort, and money? It’s easy to say yes given the results that nobody is satisfied with.  There is no doubt that the huge scale of the event, the breakdowns in communication between Danish police and UN officials that resulted in many people not being able to enter the center, and the presence of so many (too many?) world leaders.  And on numbers alone, more about which I’ll have more to say in the pages of The Japan Times later, the charges of failure are spot on.
For Japan’s political image as climate change leader, the conference was basically good news. The fact that Japan will provide nearly half of the initial 30 billion needed between now and 2012 for climate mitigation showed real leadership (that amount is more than what the entire European Union committed and nearly four times the amount of money the U.S. put on the table), while Hatoyama’s sticking to the 25 percent reduction target won him praise from many European and UN officials.
In the end, COP15 was one of the most idealistic conferences I’ve ever covered. It was not just a gathering of climate change experts. It was also a meeting of people from all over the world, from Tuvalu to Tongo, Canada to China, and The Maldives to Mexico, all of whom were grappling with the issue of what they and their societies needed to do to stave off global warming.
But after two weeks of interviews, press briefings, seeing world leaders, running into Nobel Prize winners in the hallways, and talking to all sorts of interesting characters in the media center, the strongest image I’ll take away from COP15 is a personal one.
Yesterday, Friday, I was tired and irritable, standing  in the middle of a mass media scrum of equally tired and irritable  journalists with bad breath who were all waiting on President Obama and other world leaders to emerge from the adjacent meeting room so we could ask them questions when they came out.
Suddenly, I felt a tug on my belt. Was one of the hacks trying to steal my wallet? I looked down and saw a young girl of about 6 with the most radiant smile I’d seen in many days looking up at me. “Please sir,” she said in soft African-accented English, “May I please get in front of you to see Obama?”
She was part of a group of student journalists who had managed to get  into the press center and she had broken away and squeezed her way into the media scrum. She was thrilled beyond measure to be so close to where she might see the president. Her adult minder behind her warned her not to get close to the journalists (they may or may not have fleas but they do occassionally bite).
But I could see the light of hope in her eyes, shining like the north star on a clear Scandanavian night.  ”Sure,” I said, “but be careful.” I also admit that I thought if Obama passed by and saw her, he was far more likely to stop and say hello to her — and us. So, we put her right in front of all of us, where Obama could plainly see her. She said she was from Kenya, and we knew that if the U.S. president knew that fact, our odds of getting a comment from him were even greater.
So, about 50 journalists from around the world who were haggard from too little sleep and too much work, and who fight like tigers to put the microphones in front of world leaders, parted ways for the little girl who wanted to see Obama. While we were waiting, one of her friends, who was behind the scrum, called out, “We just got tickets to the plenary session. We can listen to the president’s speech!” The girl squealed with delight. Three hours in a conference with world leaders making canned speeches! She was over the moon, and we all smiled to ourselves, having been reminded just what people in the real world, as opposed to the conference center, were like.
Obama never showed. He took the VIP exit on the other side of the building. But the little girl from Kenya was not disappointed. Would you be, if you were 6 years old and suddenly found yourself being interviewed for TV?  She handled the interviews like a pro, and long after I’ve returned home and forgotten every story I ever filed for COP15, that incident will remain in my memory for a very long time.

Thanks to all for reading this blog. And thanks for continuing to support The Japan Times

And make no mistake. Something “positive” will emerge from COP15 that 120-odd world leaders will agree to, at least while they are smiling for the TV cameras and offering flowery speeches to the print journalists. Whether what is agreed to will have any basis in sound climate science or just plain common sense is another matter.  This, after all, a political agreement designed to tide everyone over until a follow-up conference can be arranged sometime next year.

One bright spot of the conference, where there is broad agreement between the U.N. members and the NGOs, is technology and the role of technology in mitigating climate change.   This area has received virtually no coverage in the press, preoccupied as we are with the contentious politics and violent protests that have marked the Copenhagen conference. And, of course, much of the rhetoric is just that, and merely confirms in writing the obvious: environmental technology transfers to developing countries to mitigate climate change are accelerating and will continue to do so. But perhaps such transfers will soon have a bit more international legal protection under the U.N. if Copenhagen ever goes from a political agreement to a legally binding treaty.

We’ll have a better sense of that possibility sometime between, we hope, the next 12 and 16 hours.

Eric Johnston is covering COP15 and will occassionally blog during the conference. For the latest news from the conference, please support quality journalism by buying The Japan Times or visiting our Website at www.japantimes.co.jp

Will the world change after COP15? (Setsuko Kamiya photo)

In 1997, I covered the COP3 conference on climate change, which was held in Kyoto and produced the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas reductions. The final day of the conference was pure chaos. After 13 days of negotiations, developed and developing countries remained far apart, the U.S. was accused of trying to scuttle a deal, and everybody was angry at the endless bickering, posturing, pontificating and speech-making that characterized the process.

For those of you reading the COP15 reports in The Japan Times, the above will sound as familiar to you as it feels to me. Thankfully, no oil lobbyists have tried to sneak into press conferences with fake press badges, no fistfights have broken out between NGOs competing to drop their press packets on top of the keyboards of journalists while they bang out copy and, remarkably, none of the delegates or journalists is (yet) walking around in their underwear or staggering around in a drunken stupor, made worse by too many days of bad food and too many nights of little or no sleep, wondering what on earth is really going on in the closed sessions. And if Kyoto police ever sprayed tear gas into the eyes of protestors or physically beat them up, which is what happened a few hours ago, none of us in the media room ever heard about it.

But in many other respects, the Copenhagen conference appears to be heading for a Kyoto-like finish, which is to say, an overtime finish. Talk in the hallways is that the conference will be extended “a few more hours” past the Friday deadline to “well into Saturday afternoon.”

But will it do any good? All 3,000 journalists currently in the media center and adjacent hallways are asking three questions: (1) Who will blink first and offer up a serious compromise to move towards a deal? (2) Will whatever be offered pass muster with the two 500 pound gorillas in the room (the U.S. and China)?; and (3) When will I finally be able to eat real food, not plastic-wrapped sandwiches and quiche (the main staples of all the cafes)?  The last question is the one I think all of us want answered the most at this point.

Eric Johnston is covering COP15 and will occassionally blog during the conference. For the latest news on COP15, please support quality journalism by buying The Japan Times or visiting us online at www.japantimes.co.jp

NGOs make themselves heard (Setsuko Kamiya photo)

Tuesday afternoon sees press events ranging from Arnold “The Terminator” Schwarzenegger, California’s governor, to former U.S. VP/Nobel Prize/Academy Award winner Al Gore to Senator John Kerry.  But while it’s starting to feel a bit Hollywood-esque inside the press center, outside, NGOs remain furious after learning that the U.N. has greatly limited access to the center due to the arrival of nearly 120 heads of state. This means that the majority of NGO reps, who enjoyed a lot of freedom in and out of the center these past 10 days, will now be stuck outside for the rest of the conference.

This morning, the U.N. issued an apology, sort of, for yesterday’s disastrous security foul up that left hundreds of people stranded outside. The apology, though, made it sound as if those outside were gate crashers at a rock concert. The reality is, a good number of them, including my colleague Setsuko Kamiya, were standing in line to pick up their badges for which they’d already registered. They suddenly found themselves, quite literally, out in the cold, unable to get inside. Thankfully, Kamiya-san made it inside this morning.

Nor has the U.N. yet bothered to explain why it allowed over 45,000 people to register for a conference center that can only hold around 15,000 people. The U.N. hinted that Danish police were to blame, but it’s not at all clear that’s the case. Security here is only going to get worse from tomorrow, when the world leaders start arriving so more problems are expected.

Eric Johnston is covering COP15 and will occassionally blog for the conference. For the latest news and information on COP15, please support quality journalism by buying the paper or visit www.japantimes.co.jp

The long, long, long wait to get inside (Setsuko Kamiya photo)

UN officials have just admitted that there were more than 45,000 people in the conference center where COP15 is taking place, nearly 30,000 more than the center was officially designed to hold. Registration has been suspended and hundreds of people continue to wait in the freezing cold to pick up their badges, including a correspondent for The Japan Times, who remains outside as I write this, after standing in line for over six hours.

The UN also just now announced restrictions on the number of NGOs that will be allowed in for the rest of the conference. They will need a secondary badge that will be issued by the UN starting today. Those badges will be limited in number, forcing many who have been briefing the media inside the center to provide information outside the conference hall via the Internet.

It is unclear why the United Nations agreed to allow so many participants to register for badges when they knew the building had a limit of around 15,000 people. The UN was aware at least a week before the conference that overcrowding could be a problem, as press registration was suspended on Dec. 1.

“Our primary concern is the further delay of provisions for climate change due to a prevention of the international agreement on the post 2012 framework at COP15,” the Japanese Youth Delegation said in a press release.

While Japan’s youth demonstrated they’re aware of what needs to be done, their elders in the government had the dubious distinction of winning the “Fossil of the Day” award at Copenahgen on Saturday evening, presented by a collection of international NGOs to those countries that resist a deal.

“Yesterday, 11th December, was the Kyoto Protocol’s birthday. But even though Kyoto is growing older, the Japanese negotiators don’t seem to be getting any more mature. At both COP and COP/MOP today, Japan strongly opposed setting a second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol, blocking progress by refusing the chair’s text as a basis for negotiation,” a statement from Japan’s Kiko Net read.

The three-ring circus inside the COP15 conference hall contains enough tacky live entertainment to rival Las Vegas, with NGOs of every description pulling every kind of stunt imaginable to attract media attention. One of my two favorite stunts so far involved guys dressed up like clowns who were walking around outside the media center a couple of days ago with “Help Wanted” signs. What kind of help did they need?  They were looking for computer hackers. For what? One guy, dressed like Harpo from the old Marx Bros. movies, wouldn’t tell me.  But he smiled and assured me that if I volunteered my services I’d be amply rewarded, as I’d help save the planet from climate change.  As my computer skills are limited and as I’ve no desire to see the inside of a Danish prison in mid-December, I demurred on his offer.

The other stunt was the group of green space aliens walking around the center yesterday, holding up signs calling on Japan to show leadership at COP15. “Take Me To Your Climate Change” leader, said the group, who looked like they just came from a convention in Roswell, New Mexico, with their white space suits and green faces. But the signs called on Japan to come forward with ambitious financing for developing countries to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

In the five days this conference has been going on, I’ve attended, on average, five press conferences or briefings per day by UN officials, delegation heads and NGOs. In that entire time, besides myself, I’ve heard two other journalists ask about what Japan’s role is at COP15. Let’s hope that once senior Japanese ministers arrive next week that will be cleared up and the little E.T.’s will be able to phone home — and the journalists present will be able to phone their editors — and say Japan is now very visibly present and accounted for at COP15.

Eric Johnston is covering COP15 and will be blogging during the conference when possible. For the latest news on COP15 and all other aspects of Japanese society, please visit The Japan Times Website at www.japantimes.co.jp

Media central (Setsuko Kamiya photo)

Covering large conferences as a journalist is one thing. Covering a conference the size of COP15, where over 34,000 people from 190 nations are crammed together for two solid weeks is something entirely different. How does one get the job and prevent exhaustion and burnout?  With careful planning, good eating habits, and making sure that one gets a certain number of hours of sleep per night.

Unlike Japan, where I have to file in the evening, just minutes, in some cases, after a conference has concluded, the time difference here works in my favor. My day starts at around 6:30 a.m., when I wake up at the youth-hostel like Cabinn Metro hotel (the rooms are smaller than most Japanese business hotels but the bed is extremely comfortable, the most important requirement of all). Unlike many participants, who have to come in from neighboring Malmo, Sweden, an hour or more away by train, I have a 10-minute walk to the efficient Metro station. Trains arrive every four or five minutes, and a mere 90 seconds after I board the train, I arrive at the station beside the convention center.

I usually arrive in the press center by 7:30 a.m., after passing through a security check at the main gate not unlike the one you’ll find in most airports, although thankfully, we don’t have to remove our shoes before going through the metal detector. This week, at that hour, things in the hall are just starting to get busy and I can start putting together my articles for the following day’s edition in Japan. I’ve got about three hours to review what other media have said about COP15 since the night before, think about what I want write and how I want to write it, transcribe recorded press conferences and double-check niggling facts like the spelling of names, the person’s title and what those pesky UN acronyms stand for. Trust me, three hours is a lot of time in the media world.

After phoning Tokyo about my coverage and plans for the day, I head out into the Bella Center jungle. By then, things are getting busier. A blizzard of paper has arrived in the Media Center in the form of press announcements, pamphlets, booklets and reports, as well as DVDs and CDs from the hundreds – probably thousands by now — of NGOs in and around the press center. All have to be at least glanced at to ensure no critical press conference is scheduled on something I need to know for my articles. In addition, I look for interesting, off-beat events that I think are important or interesting. They may not end up in the paper but attending them gives me a better idea of what questions to ask and how to write other stories that will.

Then, it’s breakfast. There are about a half dozen cafes inside the conference hall and, in the media center, which is roughly the size of three American football fields, there is a small café. The reporters half my age (I’m 45) are loading up on carrot cake, croissants and Coca-Cola, or knocking back expressos. But most of us over the age of 30 are grabbing fresh fruit and sticking to mild coffee or apple smoothies.

Ten minutes later, I’m on the computer, or the phone, and, finally, the computer, typing away.  Once the articles are filed, the first of the daily press briefings is about to begin. Lunch, if there is time, is a quick hummus sandwich and more fruit, as well as water. Beer and wine are available, but if you’ve got an image of a media center full of boozy journalists banging out their stories, nothing could be further from the truth. The only drink flowing from the taps during working hours is water, although some of my colleagues do enjoy the excellent Danish microbeers available after 5 p.m. But until then, we’re just too busy, and the conference is just too big and intense, to risk missing a story because we weren’t mentally alert at the right moment.

The press conferences go into full force from about 1 p.m. and between around 1 and 3 p.m., the UN, the European Union, the U.S., and the developing nations’ representatives are all speaking to the media somewhere in the center. And they’re not the only ones. Television monitors are all over the place and let us know what events open to the press. At 2 p.m. today, for example, there were no less than 10 press conferences, symposiums, or other events by UN officials and NGOs taking place simultaneously. One has to pick and choose carefully.

By 5 p.m., the main negotiations have ended, as have the first round of press conferences, and it’s time to head over to the briefing by the Japanese delegation and then, afterwards, a briefing by Japanese NGOs www.kikonet.org If we’re lucky, the conferences have ended by 5 p.m., so I’ve got time to grab dinner before I head out. I’m usually done with the press briefings by around 8:30 p.m., regardless.

Then, it’s back to the media center to put together my notes, which I’ll review carefully the next morning, answer any correspondence that needs a reply, make another round of the conference hall to see what the NGOs have been doing, and return phone calls or meet sources who are only available at this time. By 10:30 p.m. I’ve sent Tokyo a note suggesting story ideas, answered correspondence, and have gotten ready for the following day. So I can finally return to the hotel. Upon arrival, I resist the temptation to join other delegates staying in the hotel for a beer or two in the main lobby, knowing that I’ve got to get up early again the following morning and knowing I’ll be less than bright-eyed and bushy-tailed if stay up late. Next week, with 110 heads of state due in, the mornings will no doubt be earlier and the nights may be much ater, so it’s a strict diet until then, although I do look forward to Carlsburg beer on tap once this is all over.

NOTE: Eric Johnston is covering COP15 and will blog the conference as often as possible. For the latest news and information, buy The Japan Times or visit The Japan Times Online.

The real problem is that negotiations in Copenhagen began after months of stalemate and, as Yvo de Boer, the UN’s top climate change expert told reporters, after previous meetings in Barcelona, Bangkok and Bonn, which were supposed overcome the main differences between developed and developing countries, ended up with little or no progress and a lot of work to do in very little time. By all accounts, the Danes, anxious to secure a deal, put forward what they hoped was  a reasonable proposal. Some of those in the developing world now expressing shock and outrage were in the room, according to de Boer, when the proposal was discussed and, apparently, didn’t raise loud protests at the time.

But that was then. With thousands of NGOs and protestors already here and thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, expected next week, the leaked text offered developing countries a chance to vent their frustration, NGOs a chance to mobilize, and journalists a chance to write about something other than the inner workings of the byzantine procedures that govern all UN meetings.

It is hard to say at this point whether or not the Danish Treaty incident will be forgotten once the world’s senior ministers arrive this weekend and begin the final negotiations on whatever agreement is to be reached by world leaders on Dec. 18, or whether or not developing countries will continue to use it as a bargaining chip. But it’s important to remember that the proposal, which suggested developing countries might agree to certain numbers regarding emissions reductions’ targets, was never a formal one and is now dead in the water.  Hard compromises lie ahead for both developed and developing countries, and as negotiations continue against growing international pressure to forge an agreement, the level of intensity and emotion  in and out of the negotiating sessions is also rising.

The road to Copenhagen has been long and filled with potholes, and it seems there will be more than a few bumps before we finally reach the end.

NOTE: Eric Johnston is covering COP15 and will blog the conference as often as possible. For the latest news and information, buy The Japan Times or visit The Japan Times Online.

The COP15 media hive inside Bella Center, Copenhagen (Setsuko Kamiya photo)

What a difference a dozen years makes. At the 1997 COP3 conference, which forged the Kyoto Protocol, the science behind global warming and climate change was generally accepted, but not universally believed. Today, those who still insist climate change is a myth or that human beings aren’t responsible for the rise in emissions are pretty much a minority worldwide, although in some countries, such as the U.S., they still enjoy a degree of political and media prominence not seen elsewhere.

In the intervening 12 years since Kyoto, an entire generation of environmental scientists, activists, politicians and bureaucrats who believe the science behind climate change, believe the earth to be in peril, and who deal with a host of green issues, ranging from drafting municipal recycling ordinances to securing funding for new green technologies, has come of age. In 1997, NGOs at the Kyoto International Conference Center in Takaragaike were often older activists who remembered the first Earth Day in 1970. They had a good understanding of the dangers to the environment. But it was rare to find one who also had a good knowledge of finance, economics, or international politics. Nor were they often seen as media savvy by my colleagues in the press room and I remember commiserating with them about how too many NGOs failed to understand basic journalistic realities like deadlines, the importance of being succinct on camera, and of being able to answer questions in a clear, concise manner that did not involve the use of charts, graphs, and (in one case I witnessed at the Kyoto conference) a set of differential calculus equations.

Environmental NGOs in Copenhagen, by contrast, are often ex-journalists who know very well how to feed the media beast or former bankers and other economic experts who can go head-to-head with corporate lobbyists in any debate on just how much strict emissions targets might really cost or the complex financing developing countries need to adjust to climate change. Gone, too, is much of the antagonism between NGOs and “industry’” and governments that marked the Kyoto conference.

What has replaced it is a shared sense of crisis, that everyone is gathered here in Copenhagen to everything possible to ensure the UN does what it can to save the planet. In short, NGOs, once outsiders, now have a mainstream credibility with journalists they did not enjoy back in 1997. While I’d like to believe that’s because they were often proved right by subsequent events, the reality is that they also became much better communicators.

The other difference between Kyoto and Copenhagen — and it’s a monumental one directly responsible for the rise in power of NGOs — is technology. My friends snicker, rightly, that my computer skills are still very much stuck in the 1990s. But in 1997, I recall seeing a few Luddites in the press room actually printing out and FAXing their articles to some poor copy editor, or having to wait until a certain hour of the night to phone in their story. Obviously, most people sent their stories electronically but blogs like this were in their infancy and nobody had ever heard of Twitter.

Walking through the huge Bella Center Saturday revealed hundreds of early arrivals busily typing away on their computers. Not in the media center, with its miles and miles of cable lines, but in every café and rest station, hallway, and corridor. The entire center is one big WiFi Hot Spot, and hundreds of NGOs and journalists are blogging and sending out live video-streams of press conferences and other events live, as they are happening, while others will tweet to their hearts’ content.

If nothing else, Copenhagen will probably go down in history as the world’s most reported event, in terms of sheer volume of stories, although every journalist there, including, of course, me, will always be striving to capture the essence of what’s truly important.

NOTE: Eric Johnston is covering COP15 and will blog the conference as often as possible. For the latest news and information, buy The Japan Times or visit The Japan Times Online.