I spent months helping prepare policy briefs on adaptation, plan how the SustainUS communications team would interface with policy and actions, and set up a framework for the international youth communications and media production teams to work within at COP. My personal (unaffiliated) involvement in yesterday’s unapproved sit-in inside the Bella Center was a transition into a new activist life outside of the COP-15 conference center.

In the end, we held our sit-in for nine hours. At around 2am, we walked away voluntarily (in some senses of the word), because the UNFCCC Secretariat and the security guards communicated an ultimatum to us: if they had to physically remove us, all 300 NGO observers (reduced from 7,000 allowed in on Tuesday and Wednesday) would be banned from entry. Three hundred is a paltry sum compared to the total number of accredited NGO observers (around 20,000), but it is far better than zero.

We were concerned about the silencing of civil society voices, and considered being arrested to show this concern. However, we agreed that to silence our voices further would hurt, not help the chances for a fair, ambitious, and legally binding deal. We were holding our sit-in to share this ask, signed by over 12 million people now, with negotiators and press in the Bella Center. We were therefore not willing to further reduce the already small chances for success in achieving this real deal in Copenhagen by allowing the UNFCCC to use our sit-in as an excuse to shut out civil society completely.

Our procession out of the Bella Center was bittersweet, mostly bitter. The sit-in had been a great success in some ways: gaining tons of media attention, engendering more smiles and thumbs up than we’d seen in the last 10 days in the Bella Center combined, and giving all of us an uplifting feeling as we realized we were not only supporting something we believed in but were also concurrently supported by millions of people including friends in the youth climate movement back in the US, official country delegates, and of course John Kerry. But as we left, we knew our impact inside the Bella Center was over, and with stalled negotiations over unacceptable texts, it felt like we hadn’t achieved enough.

But today was a new day. I woke up rejuvenated after five and a half ours of sleep (I’ve been averaging around six hours/night – better than I’d expected). This movement is still growing. Although we’re closer to tripping over climate tipping points with each delay of a binding, science-based treaty, this movement is going to continue. With added urgency to mitigate climate change and added need to help affected communities adapt to changes we can no longer avoid, the undercurrent I’m feeling among (my mostly new) friends here is that it is time to bring this movement to a new level. International Youth Climate Movement version 2.0.

Today, I fasted in solidarity with three Climate Justice Fasters who are now on day 42 (!!!) of a water-only fast. This cleanse is also a symbolic clearing of my system as I prepare for a new kind of involvement in an improved movement.

Tomorrow, I will continue (that is, unless I chicken out) down this path of a symbolic restart by shaving my head with a group of other activists in front of the Bella Center. Other things shaving my head could possibly end up symbolizing include: the ugly negotiating process, the bad decisions made by negotiators, or the catastrophic changes that unabated climate change could bring about. Those are risks I’m willing to take, though, because if the shave does turn out horribly, it will be, as the Climate Justice Fast was explained to me, a form of penance for being a part of the problem and not effective enough as part of the solution til now. At the same time, though, my shaved head will provide a promise of new growth – personally, in the movement, and for the world – to help us rise up above the challenges we have created for ourselves.

Life goes on and we will not let it pass us by. We won’t just sit and wait for a fair, ambitious, and legally binding deal. We will make it happen.

Me: November = Climate Activism Month
Louise: I know, but really, every month is climate activism month.
Me: Yea, but theres a million things to do before COP. There’s no time for other stuff. This is it.
Louise: Yea.

It’s November. The pressure is on. It’s on all of the negotiators in Barcelona. It’s on US Senators. It’s just all around on. I keep seeing countdowns and hearing tcktcktck in my head. With all this pressure, I’ve been feeling pressed for time. I started logging my time, to make sure I am spending an appropriate amount of time on any one area (be it socializing, doing school work, writing blogs/op-eds, or filming/editing climate videos). Time is definitely on my mind… all the time.

So I wanted to carve out just a tiny bit of time to reflect on some important time/timing aspects influencing climate change negotiations. Let’s break it down into past, present, and future.

Past

The most important timing factor to consider here is the length of time that industrialized have been pumping man-made greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. About seventy percent of the current stocks of greenhouse gases can be attributed to historical emissions from industrialized countries. China took the title for the greatest yearly emissions about two years now when it surpassed the US. But if we look at cumulative emissions over time (or per-capita emissions), the US is still a clear leader (U-S-A, U-S-A). Sadly this is nothing to cheer about; but it is something to rally around. I’m reminded of my years of playing soccer: everyone put their hands in the middle and we chanted, “Be Agressive, B-E Aggressive, Got to B-E A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E, Aggressive, Let’s go!”

Present

That leads me to present time. It is now time for all of us – in the sense of countries or individuals – to come together, to put our hands in the middle, and be aggressive. Countries have got to be aggressive in Copenhagen to get a bold, binding, and just climate deal (even if it is first finalized in the year after COP-15). While leaders in the Senate and around the world have pushed off the time pressure, it is still time time for us, as individuals or collectively as civil society, to be aggressive in relentlessly hounding our politicians to go for the fair and binding treaty. We can lament that a legally binding deal likely won’t come out of Copenhagen, or we can look beyond COP, and see that now we just have more time to keep building pressure. We’ve been working to build that pressure in the US for the past few years, but we’ve got to keep working to make sure that everyone knows that, given our past, it’s time for the US (again, both as a state and as individuals within that state) to step up as true leaders, as the team captain leading the rallying cry to be aggressive. We’ve got to be aggressive if we’re to eek out a win for the future of our world.

Future

To pull in a cliché here, we could say children are our future – that we’ve got to be aggressive for the sake of our children. Beyond new generations, it’s hard to say what the future will bring. One thing is fairly certain, though: what we do today affects the kind of future we will one day see and the future, past our own lifetimes, that we will never see. Our actions today affect the future of the world ecologically, our future socially as a human race, our economic future, and beyond. That’s why we can’t set a fixed discount rate to determine whether climate change mitigation action is economically worthwhile. Rather, we’ve got to move on the science-defined risks and on an ethical belief that we can’t put the world at such a high level of risk, even if we ourselves will no longer be around to see the potential, dreaded outcomes of inaction or insufficient action.

As Lord Nicholas Stern said at the Technical University of Berlin yesterday, we can’t wait ten or twenty years until today’s students, who Stern called “better educated” on climate change issues, are the world’s policy-makers. We just don’t have the time to put off securing our future against dramatic climate change.

*buzzer*

And so our little time-out has expired. To tackle climate change, we’ve got to

• diffuse the threats we can already foresee by providing adequate funding for adaptation (with concrete commitments of at least 50 billion USD/year starting by 2015 and at least 100 billion USD by 2020);
• take control of the game by setting binding targets;
• create a system to transfer technology, know-how, and funding (another 100 billion USD/year by 2020) to make sure that developing countries are also valued players in the team’s mitigation efforts.

Just because world leaders (ahem, US) are pushing off a legally binding climate treaty to 2010, does not mean that our work in Copenhagen (once again, referring here both to state delegates and to youth and other climate activists) is any less important. Now it is time to carry this game plan into the last minutes of the fourth quarter to ensure we’ve got the momentum and plans necessary to secure an overtime win in 2010 for the home team – for our home, the earth.

Ready, break!

Last month at the UN Climate Summit in New York, President of China Hu Jintao announced a promise to reduce the rate of carbon intensity, marking the first time that China has directly addressed carbon emissions policy. Keep in mind that this still means total CO2 will continue to increase, but still, a bigger commitment than we’ve seen from China so far.

There’s always a lot of debate about how much China (and other developing countries) should be putting into carbon mitigation efforts.  The traditional arguments, briefly:

• Developed countries have contributed to the majority of cumulative CO2 in the atmosphere from decades of industrialization. China is still developing, can’t afford to take a hardline stance on climate change, and deserves the chance to raise the standard of living so that its people can enjoy the same quality of life as we do in North America and Europe. Plus, as the Central Party likes to emphasize, China’s per capita emissions are significantly lower than America’s.

• As of 2006, China surpassed the U.S. in total yearly CO2 emissions, and now stands as the number one emitter of CO2. Climate change requires global cooperation and China has a responsibility to be a part of those efforts. Without China’s participation, the rest of the world will probably not be able to stabilize the concentration of CO2 at a safe level (which is now generally agreed to be 350 ppm; see James Hansen.)

Both of those are valid points, but I am always hesitant to take too much of a comparative attitude when it comes to climate policy. That often leads to finger-pointing and inaction until someone else does something, which is the kind of atmosphere we have right now. I think it’s more important – and productive – to look at what each country can do given its own set of parameters.

So let’s just look at China for a second:

It’s in China’s best interest to act on climate change now.

Aside from general world doom if we let global warming go on unabated, there are a lot of economic and security issues at stake. Domestically, desertification is rapidly reducing the availability of quality land for agriculture and development.  Disputes over loss of livelihood, land use, and land distribution already comprise a sizable percentage of Chinese incidents of social unrest, and are only predicted to increase in the future because of global warming’s effect on the land. Effectively dealing with social unrest is a major weakness of local governments and a sore spot for high-level officials.   The potential threat that such social conflicts pose to domestic security would be an unwanted burden.

Internationally, water rights issues between China and its neighbors pose potential national security problems. Pretty much all of China and Southeast Asia’s freshwater sources originate in the Himalayas. China places high importance on maintaining absolute autonomy over its internal affairs.  Because climate change issues are transnational, however, surrounding countries may place increasing demands on the country’s domestic resource management, which may lead to regional tensions.

It’s true, China has several great things going for it now: solar heaters are pretty widespread and wind is taking off in the northwest. The city of Beijing has a program to replace coal stoves with electric heaters in old hutong houses in Beijing. The CCP announced new electric car subsidies earlier this year. I don’t need to itemize everything.

But there is ample room for China to tackle climate issues beyond the more direct and obvious steps, such as making coal plants more efficient and mandating more energy from renewables. Like China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, which initiated several economic reforms, climate security might serve as a catalyst for restructuring China’s energy sector or for expanding policy  implementation and enforcement at the local and provincial level. Structurally, China’s government and tax systems reward regions based on the revenue they generate. Enforcement mechanisms are weak; local officials turn the other cheek if industry isn’t following the rules, so long as it boosts GDP. Establishing a firm rule of law and mainstreaming environmental protection and other qualitative requirements into evaluation criteria of government officials is one way to take the emphasis off of profit alone.

Let’s hope that climate change can be a platform to ease ever-growing tensions between China and the U.S. I hope that China will embrace these climate talks positively, using them as a forum to engage in more international cooperation to do more to be green at home.