Posted by John Streicker on 11 December 2011
I and a couple thousand others just pulled an all-nighter here in Durban. We have a deal.
The deal is that we now have a follow up to the Kyoto Protocol. There are some things that are good about it... It starts right away - at the beginning of 2013 when the first phase of Kyoto is done. It runs for 5 years or maybe 7 years - that did not get worked out yet.
There was a lot of negotiation about whether or not it would be legally binding. Everyone understood that legally binding is important, but the risk, especially for the developing countries is that legally binding might impose too much of the burden on the poorer countries which have contributed much less to emissions.
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Posted by John Streicker on 10 December 2011
It’s just gone midnight here in Durban. Officially the agenda was supposed to end at 5 pm Friday. So we are now 31 hours over - and counting. Earlier today smaller groupings of countries were meeting to go over the compromise proposals.
Finally very late in the day, the big hall began to fill up. The meetings started. After some opening motherhood remarks from the President Maite Nkoana-Mashabane we got down to business and almost right away we hit problems. In fact things got confounded and confusing so fast I was left shaking my head. It was a real “cluster fccc”.
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Posted by John Streicker on 9 December 2011
It’s somewhere close to midnight here in Durban, and most of the attendees have been sent home. The most senior officials from each country are staying to negotiate. This includes Ministers, Ambassadors, Senior Negotiators and I suppose their immediate support staff. Given that there are 190+ countries, that means that 1,000 people are staying to debate on through the night.
The official end to the conference occurred at 5pm this afternoon (Friday). They stopped the clocks to allow for more time to try and reach a deal. Even with just the high level group it will be tough to reach a deal with 1,000 voices and 190+ agendas. But with that many people reports leak out to us. One of them I found disturbing.
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Posted by John Streicker on 8 December 2011
There’s always lots of hope around these conventions. Generally, we hope to achieve a strong agreement to prevent the world from reaching dangerous warming. And most are happy to hope for something passable. However, the politics, bureaucracy, science, economics and history, are so complex and knotted, that expectations are generally pretty low.
Still, yesterday a small sliver of potential opened in the stormy Durban skies. The EU plus the most vulnerable countries in the world (including Africa, the least developed and the low lying island nations) came up with a potential road map for a way forward. This group is proposing binding targets set by 2015.
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Posted by John Streicker on 7 December 2011
Things are heating up here in Durban. Today Minister Kent made his statement to the entire conference. The youth were there and they decided to demonstrate their frustration with and rejection of the Canadian position.
A block of youth stood up in the gallery turned their backs on the Minister as he spoke and revealed t-shirts which read “Turn your back on Canada”.
It was quiet, peaceful, and pretty effective (I was right beside them when it happened). Security came quickly and escorted the youth out of the room and out of the conference. The large audience applauded the youth. In fact the youth got more applause than Minister Kent.
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Posted by John Streicker on 6 December 2011
The “High Level” session started yesterday. This means that the big guns arrived, including UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and South African President Jacob Zuma. Our Minister of the Environment, Peter Kent got here yesterday although he has mostly been giving press conferences off-site.
Geoffrey York from the Globe wrote a good piece on yesterday’s announcement. Click here.
I appreciate that the Minister announced funds for international adaptation, but disagree with his negotiating: “Canada has made clear this year that Canada will not make a commitment to a second Kyoto period [...] We believe that, ultimately, a new agreement that includes all of the world's major emitters in both the developing and the developed world is the only way to materially reduce annual megatonnage to the point that we can work to prevent the global warming hitting or exceeding 2%"
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Posted by John Streicker on 5 December 2011
We had a highlight as we registered for the UN negotiations this morning. Elizabeth got an official delegate badge. Not from Canada - she got it from Papua New Guinea! Mike De Souza a reporter form Canada.com was there and had a story on line within the hour. May registers for Durban summit through developing country after ...
It is unfortunate that Elizabeth, and elected Member of Parliament is not part of Canada’s official delegation. Still I was excited about the Papua New Guinea inclusion because now it means that Elizabeth has access to more of the negotiations. For those of you that don’t know it, Elizabeth has been actively involved in these negotiations since Rio when she had 1-year old Victoria Cate with her.
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Posted by John Streicker on 4 December 2011
The Green Party of Canada contingency includes our MP and Leader, Elizabeth May, Jaymini Bhikha and me. We arrived in Durban for the second week of the negotiations to develop an international treaty on climate change. Don’t we already have one of those? The answer is yes, sort of.
We have the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It came out of the Rio Earth Summit back in 1992. Everyone signed on to that including the US. However, that treaty did not include legally binding targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Meaning we did not think the treaty was enough to actually address climate change.
So we signed the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement on top of the UNFCCC treaty which sets some legally binding targets. Everyone except the US signed the Kyoto Protocol. This includes countries like Brazil, South Africa, India and China, the up and coming economies. In the media it’s sometimes reported that these countries didn’t sign Kyoto. That’s just wrong.
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Posted by John Streicker on 2 December 2011
In the past week there has been a lot of news about climate change. The UN negotiations are underway (again).
In writing op-eds for the Star, I try to not come back to this topic too often. But the truth is, it is all I can think about right now.
On Monday, news leaked that the Canadian Government plans to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol, our binding agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
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Posted by John Streicker on 4 November 2011
Last night I was buying some groceries. There in the bulk food section was a bin selling peanuts. On that bin, of peanuts, was a customer safety warning...
“We cannot guarantee that any items have not come into contact with peanuts, nuts, or other allergens.”
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