We are the world

Where Copenhagen succeeds is in giving the world its first truly global event — if you discount the soccer world cup — straddling continents, cultures, generations and professions, writes Samar Halarnkar.

Our faces are flush with excitement at just being here, part of the select 15,000 — of millions watching globally — who managed to get into this elegant tribute to Danish ingenuity and design, this former garbage-dump-turned-convention-centre powered by a giant, lazily spinning windmill.

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Abyd Karmali, Richard Folland — both dressed in standard London power suits — and I meet at a posh first-floor restaurant, just below the clear roof, which lights up the Bella Convention Centre even in this gloomy, freezing winter day in Copenhagen.

Managing Director at Merrill Lynch Commodities in Europe, Karmali is also head of Carbon Markets and Investors Association, an organisation whose members accounted for three-fourths of the global carbon market of 126 billion last year. To you and me, these are companies that finance, invest and trade in anything related to cutting out carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases now dangerously warming the earth. Folland is Senior Climate Change and Energy Adviser at J.P. Morgan in London.

We discuss how business can bring in the billions of dollars needed to help countries cope with the effects of climate change and fund green technologies when we are momentarily distracted by the lone photographer shooting a tall, elegant blonde two tables away. That’s Daryl Hannah, the Hollywood actor.

An hour before this meeting, I was struggling with a cardboard-like chicken in the heaving, noisy atrium of the Bella Centre when I met fellow struggler Abdul Karim Ag Taki, impressively clad in North African desert chic: An enormous green turban that covers his head, ears and neck, and flowing robes. Taki is an agricultural worker from Mali, a poor, landlocked West African country. The robes are effective against the hot, desert winds, freezing desert night and — with thermals underneath (he showed me) — against the north European winter. We don’t talk much. He speaks mainly French, but we bond on the chicken (“Bad”) and on being here (“so many people, much learning, vonderful!”).

Before the day is out, I meet Tulsi Tanti, a Gujarati tycoon (net worth after the downturn, about $400 million) whose Suzlon Energy is now one of the world’s largest manufacturers of windmills. I run into an angry Angelica Navarro, chief negotiator of South America’s poorest country, Bolivia; she alleges the Danes favour their European colleagues, even telling them first of room changes. I chat with Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish climate economist who is appearing later in the day on CNN’s Larry King Live to push his theory that $100 billion a year must be spent on technology fixes, not handouts to the poor. I meet Tito Puandir, an Eucadorian farmer in his colourful Andean chic; Abdou Sane, a member of parliament from Senegal, dressed in bowler hat, brown suit and blue tie, and Apisai Ielemia, the Prime Minister of the tiny island nation of Tuvalu, the world’s fourth smallest (26 sq km across five islands) and the first slated for submergence if global temperatures continue their inexorable rise.

As a summit to change the world from its self-destructive trajectory, COP15 (the 15th Conference of Parties) is a flop. If the world really has to be saved, it needs a treaty, a legally binding real deal with real targets to cut emissions. What it is getting instead is a vague, weak political statement. Saving the world? Let’s talk again in Mexico in November 2010.

Where Copenhagen succeeds is in giving the world its first truly global event — if you discount the soccer world cup — straddling continents, cultures, generations and professions. In its closing 48 hours, one single web petition by avaaz.org, an advocacy group, garners 11 million signatures, mostly young people who try to pressurise their leaders to sign on the dotted line.

In this great feast of global democracy, the young keep the old on their toes. Their colourful, creative protests flow from an intricate knowledge of the negotiations. They dance and sing — some charge the hefty Danish police (more than 10,000 of the kingdom’s 15,000 are now deployed in Copenhgen) — but their lyrics are about MRV, REED, LCA, ULULFs. Every day, they debate these acronyms and intricate sub-sub clauses of the negotiations.

The United Nations and the Danes want these voices heard, shutting out the NGOs and the young people from the Bella Centre only when 113 heads of states stream in. All views are welcome. “COP15 is an international circus that puts forward climate change as a theme, but in reality discusses nothing more than how to expand capitalism,” says Luis Henrique Moura, a Brazilian representative of a landless workers’ movement.

Nothing demonstrated the one-world theme more than the outpouring of support I now see for a country that few had heard of before Copenhagen: Tuvalu. I understand why, as I watch Prime Minister Ielemia, a stolid, large man who speaks unemotionally in short sentences. He shows the sparse audience a film with no soundtrack, a Blair-Witch-type film on what he calls, King Tides, waves that roll in during February and March. Every year, they roll in further.

No one goes inland or to high ground. The highest land is 2 metres above the sea. There is, Lelemia explains patiently, no inland, no mountain, nowhere to run. Someone asks, what will you do if the island is finally taken over by the ocean? To Lelemia, the summit is over. He has no interest in the last-minute deals between India, China, US, the European Union, Latin America and Africa to craft some kind of a statement. “We leave this meeting with a bitter taste our mouths,” he says. The true victims of climate change have not been heard.” Lelemia thanks “the public” both within and across the world who create a new rallying cry, “We stand with Tuvalu.”

The meeting is done. News spreads that the Prime Minister of Tuvalu is here, and Leleima is besieged. He answers questions patiently, impassively. He looks tired — and a bit defeated — as he shuffles along, slowly shrugging off the camera crews.

I, too, stand with Tuvalu. The sad thing is it may not make a difference.