Bob Morris Takes on COP 11 (edition 3)

Bob COP 11 Dispatch No. 3
Bob Morris, Montreal, Dec. 3, 2005


Last night was the first chance I had to attend the Sierra Club Canada, Sierra Club U. S. organizational meeting. It was both interesting and enlightening, but first I want to cover what has happened today.

I struck up a conversation with the man from National Oceanic and Atmosperic Administration (I’m not sure about that title, but anyway, he was from NOAA, the weather people). He started to give party line answers about more research needs to be done and areas of uncertainty, but I don’t think his heart was in it because when I asked what research they were doint to resolve their uncertainty he told me that was a big problem because they just got their budget two weeks ago and they took big cuts.

We agreed that this was a bad time to be cutting funding on climate research, when another man came up and my new friend from NOAA introduced me to Trey Trigg, a member of the U. S. climate change negotiating team. We quickly established that Trey, who was also a member of the U. S. team at Kyoto, could easily out acronym me. As I querried him regarding the distance between the U. S. position on climate change and the rest of the world’s, he tossed me the old line that the rest of the world and the science were just too far ahead of the American people for the government to take a stronger position and that the American people weren’t ready to cut emissions by 36% in eight years (his claim of what Kyoto would require). He was nonplussed when instead of disagreeing with him I said that Sierra Club was ready to help him remedy that problem by building grassroots support for a new energy economy based on clean power and climate protection. We parted as possible allies, with me encouraging him to think about how we could work together on our common goal, because Mother Nature doesn’t care about politics and we needed to get emission reductions going soon.

Next was the big march of at least 100,000 (my guesstimate) people calling for action beyond Kyoto from the rest of the world and admonishing the U. S. delegation to get out of the way of progress. Very orderly, icy cold and windy; I handed out flyers along the march but skipped the speeches at the end in deference to my cold. I came inside for my Dayquil, latte and to write this report. (Note : Canadians are very polite and nice about taking a proferred flyer on the street compared to people in D. C. and none of the flyers seemed to end up on the ground.

Now back to last night’s SCC and SCUS organizational meeting : those Canadians are all over this stuff! Three of Canada’s 16 voting delegates are SCC members. Elizabeth May and her team of extraordinarily sharp, mostly young volunteers have been working on this since Kyoto and are acknowledged by the Canadian Forign Minister (who is President of this whole conference and with whom they met and had substantive discussions yesterday) to be more knowlegeable than the Canadian government. They can acronym right up there with Trdy Trigg and are an active part of forming the Canadian positions on 3.9 and, article 10 (the new one) and other madly obscure but highly important negotiating points. Fred Huett is providing them with wise counsel regarding the need to not count on the U. S. to bow to reason or world opinion and alter their carbon-industry-profit centric position.

The common thread I perceive in all this is that grassroots support in the U. S. is the only force that can generate the needed rapid, orderly movement to a new energy economy based on clean power and climate protection.