Author: Betsy Bolton

The pre-2020 global stocktake was originally the focus of the facilitated dialogue but it seems to have branched off into its own terrain with the introduction of the Talanoa Dialogue. (This separation from the Talanoa Dialogue is perhaps not ideal, but it’s hard to see how the two could have remained more closely intertwined.) This summary began before the ending of the RINGO session, so I came in toward the end of the IPCC chair’s report. He spoke very powerfully, I thought–I was taking notes as fast as I could…

“Even at 1.5C, adaptation capacities will be exceeded in some places. We all know the road we are traveling. Building coal plants now commits governments to decades of fossil fuel consumption. This affects people directly.

“We need to link climate policies with efforts to retrain workers move away from carbon-intensive sectors; we need to take a close look at the economics of climate policy.

“We need to move from fossil fuels to a new resilient economy, based on energy efficiency, healthy diets, and sustainable consumption choices. This will help with stabilization of climate and improve the well-being of all. The scale need not worry us: we know that the last 30 years have also seen unprecedented technological change.

“The combination of technological change and wise policy will be powerful.

“Every bit of warming matters.
“Every year matters.
“Every individual action matters.”

Manuel Pulgar summarized yesterday’s high-level discussions of finance, summarizing the issues emphasized in discussions on Monday.  “There needs to be a massive scale-up of finance; there are concerns about access to public and predictable financing; it’s critically important to have clear eligibility criteria for financing.” He did not, as far as my notes stretch, engage the question of funding for adaptation as opposed to mitigation, and this is one major point of dispute here in Katowice.

Minister Elvestuen summarized the ambition stocktake of the first week of COP24, emphasizing both what had been accomplished and the need to do more. On the plus side of the account were numerous examples of technical advice and capacity building, as well as financial support from GEF (the Global Environment Facility) and GCF (the Green Climate Fund). The GEF has funded nearly 1000 projects in 167 countries; the GCF has funded provisional projects in 96 countries. Elvestuen also summarized the session facilitated by Rachel Kyte Monday.

Finally, L(auren?) Fabius raised the rhetorical bar. (I’m sorry not to have a photo of his image on the screen.) Here’s a semblance of his speech:

“The Talanoa Dialogue is about telling stories. My story, based on COP21, tells briefly what could and should be a successful COP24.

“It should include the rulebook of Paris Agreement, with precisely defined transparency and accounting mechanisms. It should confirm 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius as our goal, a move to zero emissions. A CBDR principle (common but differentiated responsibilities) in relation to financing with at least $100 billion per year for mitigation and adaptation. It should set a more ambitious goal before 2025. A successful COP 24 could and should send a clear message that in Katowice we decide to step up.

“I underline that in my story Katowice must be very ambitious: why? Every report since 15 shows that we need to accelerate Paris. Most recent events and reports show [this]. Many of our NDCs are not sufficient and many are not properly implemented.

“In 2018 carbon emissions are rising by more than 2% when they were supposed to be diminishing. The world—the real world—is not on track. We need to do more and do it faster.

“The IPCC report on 1.5. shows the importance of fighting for every half degree; it shows the disastrous consequences of breaking that boundary.

“The real story is not yet written and can be different. We can still build a sustainable world for current and future generations–provided we achieve a drastic cut–and by drastic, I mean rapid, deep, and just–by everyone in every sector.

“When I was preparing for this talk, I found in my papers a personal letter from former secretary general Kofi Annan, written four days after the Paris Agreement: “COP 21 showed that change is possible if the necessary political will is there. Diplomats, scientist, business people, civil society came together. With political will and unity—all is said. We need a long-term political vision of what is necessary to a just and sustainable world.

“This second week is a political week. The Parties can have a positive role if they decide to act properly–or a negative role if they act not only as somnambulists as Gutierrez rightly called them but also as spoilers.

“In the names of all those who signed it (all of you) and for millions for whom this is their only hope: Live up to the spirit and letter of Paris. Act better, faster, together. We have four days to finish a job. It is short but it is vital.”

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.

After the RINGO meeting, I went to the High-Level Session devoted to assessing mitigation efforts prior to 2020. There’s been a tendency on the part of some developed countries to plan for climate action after 2020 without undertaking any present action. The pre-2020 Global Stocktake is one way to try to increase ambition and urge countries to act more ambitiously and more immediately.

The session was launched by the COP President Michal Kurtyka, State Secretary in the Ministry of Energy in Poland.

His speech, laying out the procedures used in the global stocktake, was followed by another procedural speech and then the “High-Level Climate Champion” Mr. Inia  B. Seriuratu, Ministry of Agriculture for Fiji, launched a far more energetic call to action.

As is the way of conferences, however, that speech was followed by a relatively tame panel discussion. Rachel Fyke moderated a panel of speakers from Grenada, China, Poland, Australia, and the EU.  Melissa Price of Australia was the only woman panelist.

Predictably, but perhaps also as part of the positive focus of the Talanoa Dialogue, each speaker focused on what their Party had accomplished in the last two years.

Poland (above) is rolling out programs right now, one focusing on energy efficiency in single family homes (projected to cut 18 million tons of greenhouse gasses). Their other major program focuses on electro-mobility: turning public transport electric (from a current diesel fleet of busses). They are supporting 44 cities in adaptation strategies—the most anywhere! (His exclamation point rather than mine.)

Simon Steel of Granada was both blunt and eloquent: he complained that developed countries were supposed to lead the way on climate action, but they had not demonstrated much leadership. The Doha Amendment (an extension of the Kyoto Protocol) has not yet entered into force because only 122 countries have ratified the amendment, and 144 (another 22) must ratify to reach the 75% threshold for it to enter into force.

Grenada’s climate action has involved “liberalizing the energy sector” by breaking the 88 year monopoly of the primary energy provider. “This has put us into the international courts of arbitration, but you see our ambition.” (I wonder what other views of this “liberalization” might be.) Grenada has ambitious plans for geothermal, which is a resource for much of the Caribbean. They are also planning to increase energy efficiency and solar.

“As for the stocktake, performance has been mixed—and that’s being polite,” Steele said. “Developed countries pledged to emission reductions 25-40% below 1990 levels. They have achieved 11%. There is more work to be done. We haven’t made the progress we need to make. The Small Island Developing States are already suffering. A Category 5 Hurricane in 2017 left one island uninhabitable in Caribbean; another island had 200% of its GDP wiped out by the passing of hurricane. This is our new normal—contiue to face ravaes of climate change

Reports of the WMO, IPCCC (and others) paint a bleak and stark picture of the almost apocalyptic world that the most effective of us will face. We have a 12 year window to react: action is both financially and technically feasible—so there is hope.

International cooperation is a critical enabler for developing countries…. This is not about fingerpointing but how we can move forward as one global community in which some of us have more capacity, some require support in capacity building.

I seem to have missed taking a picture of the EU commissioner for climate action and energy. He responded pretty directly to Grenada’s points, stressing that all of EU countries had ratified the Doha amendment, that the EU remained committed to pre-2020 action as demonstrated by them having exceeded their reduction pledge (a modest pledge of 20% reduction from 1990 levels, currently 22% reduction), that the EU remained committed to the global target of 100 billion per year to the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and that they are currently the largest donor to both the GCF and the Global Environmental Facility (GEF).

China’s special representative also stressed China’s efforts and successes. Of China’s (also modest) 2020 objectives, two have been achieved three years early: 1) lower carbon intensity by 46% (the objective was 40-45%), and 2) forest coverage, which is now “much higher than expected.” Some of the translation was hard to follow, but China also mentioned electric vehicles (1.6 million), a carbon market with a trading volume of 33 billion tons—the largest carbon market in the world—as well as south-south cooperation in 29 developing countries (support in areas of early warning, reduction and prevention, efficiency, renewables).

Australia stressed its success in “incentivizing demand for renewables.” Melissa Price mentioned a “reverse auction mechanism” which “contracted 100 million tons of abatement since 2015.” The government will provide 1 billion in grants over five years, including some focused on Pacific nations; they share measurement, reporting and verification experience, such as helping in 2009 with Indonesia’s forest monitoring program, which they then expect Indonesia to share with others. There’s a reef initiative; Australian farmers are increasing their productivity. Their “Clean Energy Finance Organization” is the world’s largest green bank: they contributed 10 billion to organizations matched by double that amount of private investment. They doubled their investment levels from 2015 to 2020. Renewables will grow in mix by 23% to consumer by 2020. What can I say? It all sounded kind of weak to me.

The moderator Rachel Fyke said, “It’s clear that some things are working and working well—we’re still not where we need to be—where would you like to see the focus to be moving forward?”

The EU stressed structures and governance. Grenada said they needed more financing. China said we need to change our lifestyles (and no one picked up on that). Fyke challenged Poland and Australia more directly. “A signal must go out from this room.” Poland and Australia pretty much doubled down on what they were doing.

Then Fyke took questions from the floor.

India wanted to know whether the actions that had been taken were adequate (answer: obviously not). He mentioned significant gaps—up to 40%–noted in IPCC, but he also complained that the IPCC report didn’t do justice to the urgency of the issues: it didn’t call out those failing to act.

He proposed that any emission gap from this pre-2020 stocktake  be carried over to post-2020 (instead of letting Parties get away with failing to live up to their NDCs). Significant gaps in support (that 100 billion per year has not yet been achieved) should also be carried over. [I can’t imagine developed nations agreeing to this.]

Ecuador ramped up the pressure. She spoke fast and furiously: “None of the clear mandates have been met. We are moving away from the possibility of meeting targets, putting at risk our trust in process. The IPCC report clearly underscored the importance of efforts on poverty eradication—ministers recognized main countries responsible for situation have not met responsibilities: they are falling behind. This is the climate debt we have to the planet and to current and future generations. We need financing, tech transfer, capacity building. Kyoto was not met, Cancun not met: we hope the secretary’s report on pre-2020 will be updated regularly and used to determine opportunities for support.”

The Maldives got the last word on the panel: Concerns about progress led us to call for stocktake last year: we knew we were falling short—Small Island Developing Nations are uniquely vulnerable. We were startled by findings of the IPCC: without dramatic transformation, we could hit 1.5 by 2030. This shines a new light on the importance of pre 2020 action.

 

 

 

 

RINGO (Research and Independent NGOs) is committed not to advocacy but to evidence-based policy making and good process. Beth Martin, one of the two “focal points” of RINGO, gave us a great overview of where we stand in the process and where to find relevant materials and texts. In case you’re interested in following along at home, here’s some of what Beth pointed us to…

WARNING: this is a geeky post. It’s long and detailed, but it might give you a sense of how this meeting operates (perhaps)—or at least as much of that operation as I’ve managed to gather here.

This second week kicked off with a note from the COP President–Eriko posted the link back on Sunday. That note said a couple of things:

This note is a wake-up call. We’re not moving fast enough! Time to bring in the big guns! No more open discussion! The officers in charge of the subsidiary bodies are going to act as experts helping facilitate dialogue, and pairs of ministers (from different countries) will also be in charge of moving things forward. Part of the problem here is that the basic text of any agreement has to be settled by the end of Tuesday because then the ministers or high-level negotiators have to work out political disagreements and then the agreements are sent to Nairobi to be translated into all the UN languages and checked multiple times—all before being released on Friday.

This lets us know what are the major issues still needing to be negotiated. You can actually trace the process of negotiation up to this point if you go to the home webpage of the conference: https://unfccc.int/katowice. That takes you to something that looks like this (only the first image is a green-y picture of the venue):

If you scroll down, on the right hand side, below the grid of options, you can see “Session Information” and under that “Session pages.” You may have to squint to see it here:

If you click on APA 1-7, that takes you to a page for the sessions of the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Paris Agreement:

Click on “APA 1-7 draft conclusions” and you can open a document (English) that looks like this:

And on later pages of this document, you can see the elements that have been under discussion:

This is how it works when a document is written by committee. You work on the problem parts rather than trying to write the document as a whole.

There’s been a lot of controversy over financing, especially “9.5” and “9.7”–Article 9, paragraphs 5 and 7. The debate on 9.5 addresses climate finance and 9.7 addresses “transparency” (also described as accounting). If you click on the link for SBI (Subsidiary Body on Implementation) on 9.5, you see the following:

Okay, that’s quite a few words to think about and argue over when you’ve got 10–20 people in a room negotiating. One key thing to know: brackets indicate something not everyone is wiling to agree to. So the entire document is in brackets at this point: nothing is set in stone. But the more detailed disagreements appear both in the preamble (before the numbered items), focused on which elements of the Paris Agreement are relevant to “recall,” and in the question of which part of the climate regime is officially going to look at the reports issued biennially (every two years): some people want the SBI (Subsidiary Body for Implementation) to be in charge; others want the synthesis to be sent to the CMA (Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement). Overall, though, the text is pretty free of brackets, once you get past the fact that the whole thing is bracketed.

Here’s another example, from SBSTA (Subsidiary Body on Scientific and Technical Advice): again, the entire body of the text is bracketed, but beyond that, there’s debate about whether or not to include points one and two, five and six, and nine.

This is the text that was sent to the COP Presidency on Saturday, completing the work of the APA (Ad Hoc Working Group on the Paris Agreement). Add all of the pieces of this work together (and I’ve only included two examples from a much longer list) and you begin to see how complicated these negotiations are.

We finally made it in! Just the walk back to the first meeting was fairly impressive. Most of the day, these ottomans were full of people conferring, resting, shmoozing.

Just past the elevator was this little corner for a “people’s seat.” Around the corner to the left are the big rooms for the plenary sessions.

The pavilions are fairly ornate: one woman was dancing in traditional dress in the Indonesia pavilion in the middle of the day.

This was right at 8 am, before the crowds. Much of the day, it’s all a little overwhelming and high stimulation.

Poland is pushing a “just transition” from coal to a green economy, but as with this exhibit, there seems to be more coal than green in the mix just now.

Still, Saadiq and I learned in the Food Loss and Waste side event that the apples given out freely are all “rescued” (from destruction on the basis of imperfection).

The RINGO meeting at 9 am was larger than I expected (about 100 people in the audience), and it was nicely organized and implemented. This was only about half the panel, a few minutes before the start of the session.

 

On the bus ride home from Krakow, Monica made space for me to sit with her. She is attending the COP as an observer, as part of an NGO: the Inuit Circumpolar Council. As we got on the road, it was already dark though it was only 4 pm. “When does it get dark for you?” I asked Monica, who lives in Nunavut. “It’s not as bad as here!” she exclaimed, taking a photo. I followed suit.

Nunavut. Monica’s community is the largest in the territory with 7000 people. Other communities are smaller: 700 or 2000 or 3000 people. There are no roads between communities: the travel is all by airplane. I was surprised to learn that we live in the same time zone, however, because I always think of northern Canada as slanting westerly. Clearly not.

The Inuit Circumpolar Council includes members from Canada, the USA, Greenland, and Russia. Each country provides support for its own section of the council: the Canadian staff is largest, followed by the US, then Greenland, then Russia. They speak English (with the exception of the Russians, who presumably work with translators). They could speak their own language(s) as well—and Monica switched seamlessly from English with me to Inuit on a phone call—but the dialects are so different that comprehension would be slow and they would be less effective than they can be using English as a common language.

The Council works on many issues, climate change among them. Every community Monica represents needs health care and education and recreation centers and funding is scarce, so communities have to prioritize among their needs.

Because it was dark, and Monica was tired, having flown in from Anchorage via Seattle, I spared her my normal request for a photo and a card. Here instead is a link to the Circumpolar Inuit Declaration on Resource Development Principles in Inuit Nunaat:

declaration_on_resource_development_a3_final

Sunday the COP was closed. Roughly half of the attendees went to Krakow, the other half to Auschwitz. Eriko, Saadiq and I went to Krakow, Melissa to Auschwitz. (Eriko has already been to Auschwitz; Saadiq and I will go at the end of our time here.)

The path to the shuttle bus to Krakow (leaving from the COP) was full of one of the Christmas markets the first week’s delegation described.

People here are really into Christmas!

On the bus to Krakow, I had the great pleasure of chatting with Sr. Saddy Rafael Pineda Castellanos, part of the Honduras delegation. Señor Pineda is the head of the Forest and Climate Change Department in Honduras. He is part of a twelve-person delegation and his primary focus is on mitigation, with some attention to adaptation and financing, which others are also helping to cover. The delegation is spread around the area, with some people staying in Krakow, and others in small towns some distance from Katowice. This makes it hard for them to meet and plan each days’ negotiations, but they make do with WhatsApp.

It sounded to me as if the Honduras forestry department is doing a lot with the resources available: they have plans for restoring one million hectares of forests. They broker deals, providing restoration plans for private landowners and connecting people to funding when needed. Honduras is also working hard on watershed remediation, especially in the dry corridor.

I was pleased to hear that a recent extradition law (extradition to the US for drug trafficking) had decreased gang violence. Food security continues to be a big issue, and climate change is driving migration, but so is the differential in wages between the US and Honduras.

Señor Saddy Pineda will be happy if this COP24 produces three things: a completed Paris Rulebook, a completed Talanoa Dialogue, and a financing mechanism. I’m crossing all my fingers and toes that this may come true.

In fact, in Krakow, at the Wawel Castle and surrounding buildings, I climbed the bell tower of the Cathedral. The audio guide says that if you put one hand on your heart and touch the clapper of the bell with your other hand, your wish will come true. I tried it both way: left hand on heart, right on bell, and vice versa.

 

Sunday the COP was closed. Roughly half of the attendees went to Krakow, the other half to Auschwitz. Eriko, Saadiq and I went to Krakow, Melissa to Auschwitz. (Eriko has already been to Auschwitz; Saadiq and I will go at the end of our time here.)

On the bus to Krakow, I had the great pleasure of chatting with someone who is part of the Honduras delegation. I won’t say any more about that conversation until I get approval from my new friend, but the conversation made me think about the broader context of the negotiations here.

For those following along at home, I thought it might be worth laying out some of the groupings and negotiating blocks operative here. (Lots of lists and names coming up below, but this chart lays out the blocs more visually.)

The UNFCCC organizing Parties to the Framework Convention into three groups: Annex I, Annex II, and non-Annex I. This division is based on earlier groupings of countries through economic development, most notably the OECD or the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Annex I countries were either part of the OECD when the UNFCCC was formed in 1992 or they were Economies in Transition (Russian Federation, Baltic States, several Central and Eastern European States); Annex II countries were a subset of OECD countries “not in transition:” because of their level of economic development, Annex II countries are required to provide financial and technical support to developing nations. Developing nations are sometimes called non-Annex I nations: the point is that they should be recipients of finance and technology transfer.

The UNFCCC also operates in terms of regional groupings, mostly for the purposes of electing representatives to the Bureau. The regional groupings are African States, Asian States, Eastern European States, Latin American and the Caribbean States, and the Western European and Other States–the “other states” include Australia, Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland and the United States of America.

But negotiating blocs have arisen separately from this geographical grouping.

Honduras is part of AILAC, a negotiating group including Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panama, Paraguay, and Peru. I asked why Nicaragua was not part of this group and Paraguay was—the map of this group stretches oddly to allow for exclusions and inclusions. My seatmate explained that Nicaragua was more aligned ideologically with Venezuela and Cuba and Paraguay was not part of ALBA, so they needed a different coalition. Indeed, in the chart below (same as the one above) which was drawn up by then-student Jonas Haller, Nicaragua and Bolivia join Venezuela and Cuba as part of ALBA as well as forming part of the LMDCs group. Venezuela along with Ecuador is also part of OPEC.

The UN always offers ample portions of alphabet soup. In this case, AILAC is the Independent Alliance of Latin America and the Caribbean; ALBA stands for the Bolivarian Association for the Peoples of our America. The G77 was originally the Group of 77 formed in 1969 during the UN Conference on Trade and Development; it now includes about 133 Parties. Because this large group is also very diverse, smaller groups have formed within it: the African Group (54 Parties; established at COP1 in 1995), SIDS (Small Island Developing States; roughly 40 Parties; first to propose draft text of reducing emissions in Kyoto protocol), LDCs (Least Developed Countries; 48 Parties). The LMDCs are Like-Minded Developing Countries, including both Iraq and Iran (while Iran is left out of the Arab group). EIG stands for Environmental Integrity Group. OPEC stands for Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries; OECD stands for Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The Umbrella Group came together after adoption of the Kyoto Protocol; the subgroup of Annex II nations in the umbrella group are also sometimes called Juice Cans (Japan Iceland US Canada Australia Norway New Zealand: JUISCANNZ is how I envision this, but I have no idea whether or not that’s correct).

The chart suggest how confusing it can be to think about any given Party’s allegiances and/or negotiating priorities. It also shows the impact of history. China, for instance, might have had more in common with African nations in 1969, but its development trajectory has been quite distinct in the past few decades–but the negotiating alliance remains intact.

In addition to these three categories of Parties (rich Annex II, doing-pretty-well Annex I, and developing non-Annex I), there are also a host of “constituencies,” including observers like our little Swarthmore delegation. But that will be another post, full of its own alphabet soup.

 

Networking at the COP began well before our arrival in Katowice. By the time we were on the bus to board the plane to Poland, it was clear that we were mostly all heading together to the COP. (Yes, I am as tired as I look in this photo!)

Ranier, my seatmate, works in International Climate Protection and Emissions Trading for EnergieAgentur NRW (short for NordRhein Westphalen, a western German state). He was flying in to help put on three side events: the first was happening at 4pm this afternoon in the Market square of Katowice, explaining the importance of the COP to the general public. This was his tenth COP! We talked about discouraging it was to see nations making irrational decisions both on climate and on other issues of governance. Ranier acknowledged the difficult regional politics leading to a slow-down in the shift to renewables in Germany.

Across the aisle, Dr. Maria Francesch-Huidobro was flying in from Hong Kong, where she has lived and taught and worked for 31 years. She will be presenting at the WWF’s “Panda Pavilion” on the 13th about efforts in monitoring progress toward the Paris Agreements and also (I think) about sustainability efforts and collaborations of large Asian cities such as Hong Kong. Maria is a political scientist who has run environmental studies programs in Hong Kong and is now working with various think tanks, including “Carbon Care InnoLab, a charity for sustainability,” which provides a platform for young entrepreneurs to work on sustainability innovations. Maria and I talked loosely about the possibility of bringing her in via Skype for a guest lecture in some environmental studies classes. I was very taken with her charm, her breadth of knowledge and her good-natured teasing of our different nationalities. (Despite her decades of living in Hong Kong, Maria herself is Spanish, and her discussion of Brexit was hilarious. “The British, they have a mandate, and so they set everything aside, no matter if it means pounding their heads against the wall. In Spain, we don’t do this. We say, this is a bad thing, we won’t carry on. Teresa May, she says, ‘I will do this thing; I will be a martyr.’ ‘No, lady, no!'” Maria says, waving her hands, “Don’t be a martyr!”)

Beyond Maria, Olivia Reshetylo is flying in from Vancouver, where she works with Student Energy, a group that works on teaching energy literacy to college students. I think she said the group is composed of 50,000 students now and just starting to expand into the USA, currently at Berkeley, Stanford, and Rhode Island. Perhaps Swarthmore next!

As we came close to landing, I was struck by the monoculture woods near the city.“You can see,” said Ranier, “why wood is so important to the Poles.” This visual image did indeed give a different kind of context to ongoing debates about whether or not biomass or biomass + coal should be included as a pathway for low emissions. (The Climate Action Network, for instance, points to evidence that biomass is worse for the climate in the short term than fossil fuels.)

Once we were on the ground, we looked around for transport. Other, more experienced COP attendees insisted that there would be free public transport to the meeting, but that turned out not to be the case. Quite a lot of head-shaking and clucking ensued. Melissa called an Uber for our four-person delegation to get into the city.

Martin drove us in: he was very patient with my attempts to speak Polish with him, as well as our inability to work out how to ask basic questions, such as, “Was that a quarry we saw from the sky?”

Martin drove us past farmlands (“No one farms anymore; they work in the city”) and a power plant:

and signs of globalization:

He couldn’t really explain the little green puff-balls in the trees (a different species? a particularity of this species of tree?) but he did say that Poles will climb the trees to gather those woody balls and paint them gold for Christmas decorations.

I asked Martin what he thought about the COP: was it urgent? Did he want people to get serious? Or did he want them to go away? “It makes no difference to me,” he said. “It’s just an expensive party.” (Ouch!)

The driving got a little more complicated as we drew close to the International Conference Center. Liz had warned us that there was a demonstration planned with heavy police presence. I had asked Martin about it earlier (with translation assistance from Melissa and Eriko) and he had snorted: “This isn’t France!” he said, with some disdain. Still, in the end, the roads were blocked off. Martin finally dropped us off a couple of blocks away and we walked down to the venue past something like 40 or even 60 police vans,

and an astounding number of armed, massed police. We heard some drumming and eventually saw a handful of rather bedraggled marchers–but they were outnumbered by the police at a ratio that seemed like 100 to 1.

Finally, we arrived at the venue and registered!

Only to discover that our badges won’t let us into the venue itself until Monday.

But wonderful Liz Nichols came out to greet us and tell us more about the functioning of the COP than our jetlagged brains could really process, much as we tried.

Off we go, into the darkening skies, past more police, in search of hotels…

Hard to believe we’re really here!

Our first delegation departs for Katowice, Poland, tomorrow, November 30th. Chemistry and Environmental Studies Professor Christopher Graves is leading a delegation of four students, all seniors: Amos Frye (Environmental Studies honors major), Shana Herman (Environmental Policy and Conservation Biology), Marianne Lotter-Jones (Biology major, Environmental Studies minor), and Brittni Teresi (Psychology and Environmental Studies double major). The team will arrive in Katowice on Saturday and attend the opening of the conference on Monday. We hope you’ll follow along with their adventures and post comments and questions to help them share the COP experience with you!