Day 13: Did hope die today in “Hopenhagen”?

Sunday, December 20th, 2009 | uncategorized

19 Dec 2009

Leonie Joubert is a science writer, reporting for Independent Newspapers from the United Nations climate negotiations taking place in Copenhagen from 7 to 18 December. This is her blog-on-the-side.

Just quickly. I’m shattered and need to get to bed.

By the end of the day, yesterday, it was clear that we wouldn’t get a legal agreement. We were too close to the midnight deadline set by the United Nations, and countries were still stuck on the main issues of emissions cuts and climate compensation.

A draft of a new document, the “Copenhagen Accord” had been circulating all day – so we knew for sure that we’d see a political agreement come out of the climate summit.

What we didn’t expect was that Barack Obama would call a press conference close to midnight (with only White House press allowed into the room) in which he announced to the world that this agreement had been reached!

He gallops into town at the 11th hour, calls a meeting with 28 people – heads of state (including our prez) and leaders representing the different blocs. They decide to back the Copenhagen Accord. He announces it to the world (so it’s being called the “Obama Accord”!!) before all the 192 country representatives have had a chance to state in plenary whether or not they back the thing.

The cheek of it!

I had to file copy very early this morning, to get into the Sunday papers. By 4am, many of the smaller and more vulnerable countries had rejected the accord out of hand. So I wrapped up my 1 000 word piece stating that the summit was a failure, with the accord being rejected. I filed at 6am and left for our digs to get some sleep.
I slept until 10am, only to wake in time to find the entire political landscape had changed and that the accord had been accepted! I got onto the phone to my editor back in SA to see if there was still time to rework the story to show the very final stages of development.

Thankfully, after the quickest rewrite in history, we managed to get the updated story through in time. It was a harrowing day – one 24 hour shift, three hours of sleep, then final edits and one last news story. Whatever way you read it, though, Hopenhagen became Hopelesshagen this week because the summit was a failure, if you take the science of climate change seriously.

I drifted through the rest of the day in a fog – a combination of losing a sense of time passing (not seen much sunlight during the past fortnight), lack of sleep and the demands of deadlines. But most of all, there was an undercurrent of despair because cheap politicking and White House power mongering hijacked a democratic (if flawed) negotiation process last night.

Scorched

Rational Writing by Leonie Joubert