Wow! What a really interesting first day at COP! I feel like everything has just been an absolute blur and that I’ve been at the COP for way longer than I actually have been.
Like I saw David Attenborough today… How crazy is that?!?!
Anyway while seeing David Attenborough (a.k.a my second Grandfather) was definitely the highlight of my day, I also went to some very interesting meetings that gave me a lot of food for thought. In one of the side events entitled
“Climate Friendly Technologies” one of the speakers off handedly mentioned that he would prefer to see a COP structured where all the important negotiating stuff happened as side events (observers can’t attend these events anyway so what does it really matter to us?) and that people’s presentations on current work that they are doing to actively reduce carbon emissions or adapt to climate change should have more of a focus at these conferences. I thought that this one comment was actually quite profound and it got me to thinking about what a COP would be like if we focused on stuff we ARE doing instead of stuff that we SHOULD be doing. How would that change people’s perception and attitudes towards climate change? What sort of message would that send in terms of placing the importance of climate change policy on people instead of powerful governments?
At the end of the day these are rhetorical questions and I do not think that I have been able to process a comprehensive answer. But, from my first impressions of COP, it does seem like there is a definite hierarchy of events that people prioritize to attend. For example: Why were there more people at a talk from Arnold Schwarzenegger than there were at a talk about indigenous voices?
Just some food for thought for my first day at the climate negotiations. How effective is COP anyway? I guess all of us at Swat will get back to you on that sooner or later.
—Marianne
Marianne, when I first read your title, I thought of the US prison education program called Inside-Out and it made me think of the Talanoa dialogue inside the COP and the ban on demonstrations outside as a kind of inversion of the carceral state. But that wasn’t what you were thinking of at all!
I like the idea of foregrounding what people are doing that works–but I don’t think we can afford to push to the margins the ongoing governmental failure to make urgent, dramatic reductions in emissions.
How effective is COP? What can COP effect? I look forward to hearing more of what you think about these questions going forward.
Betsy