Last week, protests were a kind of ongoing theme, and of course we arrived at the tail end of the biggest outdoor protest allowed here. I say allowed, but some folks here have told us that 170 activists were arrested at the Polish border.
Within the walls of the conference, however, some protest is indeed allowed. A little after 1 on Monday Wells Griffith, President Trump’s international energy and climate advisor, tried to push clean coal technology. He and his colleagues on the panel were shut down by chanting and singing.
In this picture, from the New York Times article Tuesday, you can see Ben Goloff from the back, just behind the plaid arm with the mic or camera:
And here he is outside in the hall, as the protest marches out of the room and down the hallway.
Later in the day, the developed countries involved in the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage were among those winning the Fossil of the Day award:
To celebrate the 5th anniversary of the Warsaw Mechanism, CAN presented a birthday card full of wishes the global community doesn’t ever quite fulfil.
But after the birthday celebration, Austria got a fossil all to itself, for taking incentives intended for carbon emissions reduction and using them to build coal, oil and nuclear infrastructure.
There’s so much theatre here: in the high-level sessions, the negotiations, the pavilions, the hallways. Part of me wants someone to design a more inclusive theatrical process to bring us all to a different place of deeper collaboration.
There are interesting demonstrations happening inside. I think the authoritarian regime in Poland is hurting the message to the broader community. In Bonn there were a lot of art exhibits (and other installations) outside of the building that the local community could see and interact with. This was noticeably lacking in Katowice.