Photo: Graeme Cook
I arrived in Copenhagen at 1811 today, bang on time, amazing really given that the train made part of its journey aboard a ferry crossing the Fehmarn belt between Germany and Denmark (the photo above was taken from the train in northern Germany).
On arrival I headed to an event at the Klimaforum, which is billed as the alternative climate conference – inside it felt a bit like a music festival without the music, with many events and conversations taking place. The event I attended with Partick Harvie MSP saw activists from Brazil, Australia, Denmark and other countries share the stage, and I met the Irish Energy Minister, who was in attendance. The speakers felt that it isn’t too late for a legally binding agreement at Copenhagen but it has to be based on the science and so anything half hearted is little good.
Politicians on the stage from Canada and Australia drew attention to what they see as climate damaging policies around the exploitation of the tar sands in Canada, and coal in Australia. They also raised the prospect of an agreement in Copenhagen that could look more ambitious than it really is if deals are struck over the way in which land use, land use change and forestry are dealt with (emissions can be locked up using certain land practices, and this can be recognised in net emissions accounts). The small South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu got a lot of praise for standing its ground in looking for an ambitious agreement during negotiations over the last week, and their website is today’s interesting link.
Formal negotiations took a bit of a break today, but that didn’t mean too much as 48 Environment Ministers still met to pore over draft texts of agreements.
The estimates of the numbers attending yesterday’s climate march have now reached 100,000. It has come to light that many of the arrests made were pre-emptive, under new powers passed by the Danish Parliament allowing detention of anyone it is thought might commit a crime.
All the Scottish Parliament delegation is now together, staying in Malmo (Denmark was full..). Tomorrow we are all off to a Scotland Day being hosted by the Scottish Government. We’ve already bumped into Scottish Enterprise officials who’ll be there as well.
