Bella Center, Copenhagen, Denmark
From Monday December 7 to Friday December 18, world leaders and about 30,000 delegates from various parts of the five continents will be mingling inside this building called the Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark, for the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference under the leadership of UN Climate czar Yvo de Boer who told reporters: “I believe that negotiators now have the clearest signal ever from world leaders to draft a solid set of proposals to implement rapid action.”
This is once again one of those U.N. big jokes organized with much fanfare, with nothing to show in terms of results.
This is what NASA Goddard Institute James Hansen, one of the world top climatologists, told the Guardian about the powwow at Bella Center in Copenhagen:
“I would rather it [agreement from negotiations] not happen if people accept that as being the right track because it's a disaster track…And more importantly, “We don't have a leader who is able to grasp it and say what is really needed. Instead we are trying to continue business as usual.”
The whole approach is so fundamentally wrong that it is better to reassess the situation. If it is going to be the Kyoto-type thing then [people] will spend years trying to determine exactly what that means.”
This is analogous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced by Winston Churchill… On those kinds of issues you cannot compromise. You can't say let's reduce slavery, let's find a compromise and reduce it 50% or reduce it 40%.”
So nothing is going to happen in Copenhagen. I don't know where the designers had their heads but even their ill-conceived logo encapsulates visually the story: an untanglable entanglement of strands of contradictory interests. Maybe they thought the logo would mean, "We're all together in this predicament." But I don't read it that way at all...
Ill-conceived logo
That’s why the whole East Anglia University Climategate concocted by hackers paid by oil companies and oil-producing countries 15 days prior to COP15 looks like an unnecessary overkill—though, understandably, they have a stake in the whole deal in Copenhagen: if the world, by a miracle, were to agree on abandoning cheap fossil fuels, their interests, according to Belgian scientist Jean-Pascal Van Ypersele of the Catholic University of Louvain, are bound to shrink by $4 trillion by 2030!
The German NGO Klima-Allianz had it right in its performance art event “Klimaaktionstag” at Brandenburg Gate on Saturday December 5 where activists donning Obama, Merkel, and Hu lookalike masks were turning blue bloviating while the fish tank, emblem of the sinking terra firma, in which they were powwowing, was inexorably filling up with water. Fast!
Saturday December 5, 2009. Brandenburg Gate, Berlin
(c) 2009 IDEEGRUN/Markus Pichlmaier
But this entire climate change nightmare is at the horizon of the morrow. In the meantime, African delegates need to put to good use the unexpected savings on their stipends the mayor of Copenhagen had inadvertently helped them make by distributing this stupid, condescending and moralistic card in hotels where delegates are staying:
Well, prostitution being legal in Denmark, this initiative of the mayor caused the wrath of the Danish union of sex workers who vowed to have their members give free sexual services to delegates: just show up with the stupid card at the door of any sex worker and you get free service. The free sex service is purported to be valid for the whole duration of the conference! What the union of sex workers didn’t specify is whether its members would be content of being shown the same card on each occasion… No, that wouldn’t work. I think you need to pocket a bunch of those cards from the hotel concierge desk.
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