Another kaleidoscopic 36 hours in Copenhagen
Saturday, December 11, 2009
James Balog-Copenhagen, Denmark
EIS reaches out further, with one show Friday morning to the U.S. State Department pavilion crowd, then another, in late afternoon, to the WWF group. Lunch with the remarkable French photographer/filmmaker/activist Yann Arthus-Bertrand (”Earth From Above”, “Home”): he’s crazy about the EIS imagery, which, needless to say, put us on very good footing. He has all sorts of interesting projects he wants to do with us–not the least of which is to put the material in the current environmental film festival his organization, goodplanet.org, has organized at the Danish Film Institute. I closed out Friday at a screening of the inspiring-and-depressing blockbuster, “The Age of Stupid,” a philosophical, humorous, action-based film about the climate change paradoxes of today and the apocalypse that is looming for 2050 or beyond. Afterward, Franny Armstrong, the director, was a steady, bemused voice of inspiration and hope.

Today, 25,000 of us marched down the wonderful streets of Copenhagen in support of climate change mitigation. The placard I liked best: “There is no Planet B.” That says everything we really need to think about.

I come back to my little rental apartment tonight; in the quiet of solitude, after all the shouting and cheering and music; a nagging question remains: “What does it all matter?” Or, is any of this sturm und drang, from COP-15 to the scientists to the U.S. Congress to today’s march, going to make a damn bit of difference? Possibly not. Global society, with its economics and technology and ideologies, may be a mastodon that cannot be diverted from its path. If that’s the case, we’re doomed.

But I ask myself the reverse question: is doing NOTHING any better than doing what we’re doing?

The answer is “No.” We MUST do what we’re doing. And, with an effort of willpower, force us not to slip into despair. Failure is not an option, as they used to say during the launches of American astronauts to the moon. And if failure is not an option, neither is despair.

We march on.

News from Copenhagen
Thursday, December 10, 2009
James Balog-Copenhagen, Denmark
Fascinating day, once again. In one room at the State Dept. pavilion, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar (formerly a senator from my home state of Colorado) was holding forth. Simultaneously, in a large common room immediately adjacent to the Secretary, President Obama was projected on a huge screen, delivering his Nobel Prize acceptance speech from Oslo (just across the North Sea a bit from Copenhagen; all eyes on Scandinavia today, I’m thinking…).

Salazar has drawn a lot of liberal fire for being too oriented toward resource development and not enough toward innovation and conservation. I can’t help but be frustrated at times with the administration’s policy–yet I also understand the ridiculous juggling act these guys are engaged in, trying to move toward a new future without leaving history, our functional present and the middle of the road constituents too far behind. Democracy in large countries is unbelievably difficult. It is many, many orders of magnitude more difficult than in small democracies like those of Scandinavia, as well as places like the Netherlands, Switzerland and Belgium. Five or six or eight million people–the size of one of our large-ish metropolises–is a LOT easier to coalesce into a coherent, crisply functioning whole than organisms like the U.S. which is over 200 times larger than Denmark.

Anyway, Salazar espoused a lot of good ideas. Here’s the one I liked best:

“Over the past eleven months, President Obama has led us out of the darkness of a failed energy policy…”

And then there was the Prez himself. What a speech maker, backed by superb writers and his own writing skills, spinning out phrase after phrase meant for the ages:

He proposed a “…continual expansion of our moral imagination.” (One of the most fundamental issues beneath the climate change debate.)

And his amazing line near the end of the speech: “So let us reach for the world that ought to be — that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.” That’s where we need to be going, emotionally, mentally, and conceptually. Arguing about nuts and bolts and how we distill the dead effluvia of ancient ages will only take us so far.

News from Copenhagen
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
James Balog-Copenhagen, Denmark
Exciting day, listening to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson speaking in a small and relatively intimate setting about the agency’s “endangerment” ruling just a couple days ago. Some quotes:

“It’s time that we let the science speak for itself… Climate change is real.”

“The U.S. acknowledges the threat of climate change and we need to make up for lost time.”

“Many businesses have been wanting a clear signal on carbon. We want to make it clear….We’re using the Clean Air Act to do what it does best: to make reasonable, cost effective regulations.”

Ironically, the Clean Air Act, along with several other pieces of landmark environmental legislation, was enacted during the Nixon administration. In the late ’60’s and early ’70’s, the Nixon administration seemed terribly conservative. But now, after decades of a generally conservative trend in the country, Richard Nixon seems like a liberal visionary. Go figure…

———–

After I gave my EIS presentation at the U.S. pavilion to a large crowd, I was interviewed by a Brazilian TV station. The reporter asked me a real zinger: “America has invested so much money and so many people in the science that has shown the world the seriousness of climate change. You lead. You have also led the world in consumer lifestyle, and have led the world in carbon emissions. Is there, in fact, a debt you owe the developing countries, based on your knowledge and your history?” Excellent question, isn’t it? Is our prosperity based on our profligacy? If so, do we want to compensate for it? If
not, why not? If we do, how, without simply giving away the hard-earned technological advancements of American entrepreneurs?

News from Copenhagen
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
James Balog-Copenhagen, Denmark
What a perfectly terrific convergence of insight and passion this place is! The conference logo–a circle with an intricate mesh of interlocking lines–is apt: it speaks in elegant graphic terms of the global convergence of people determined to free us from the burden of our inherited history and turn us to a livable future.

The Bella Center, a truly cavernous series of meeting rooms (airplane hangars would be more like it), is a hub of activity and conversation. Rumor has it that 45,000 people are here–or will be here before this is all over. I’ve also heard 65,000. I don’t know what’s true, because I don’t stand at the door and count! But there are a LOT of people, with everyone scurrying around to their respective areas of impact and/or expertise.

Saturated as I’ve been for years with climate change knowledge, I’m still learning something new every time I turn around. NASA is showing some truly jaw-dropping imagery of the changing earth on “Science on a Sphere” (SOS for short). About six feet in diameter, SOS dangles from the ceiling of one of the US State Department rooms. Specially programmed projectors beam a spherical rendering of the earth, as seen by various satellites or computer models, onto the sphere. Many different images blew me away. But the most incredible one was a view of the lights of commercial airplanes flitting all over the globe, day and night, night and day, etching out the patterns of the hummingbird (aka Humanity) as it makes its daily migration. (Ahem, that migration pattern includes me too; in fact, I could see one little light beam marking the same trace I made in the sky the other night from New York to Frankfurt and then Copenhagen.)

Big news of the past two days is that the US EPA wants to regulate GHG as injurious to human health. Perfect: if the legislative process can’t stop the fossil madness, then the regulatory process can.

If desire can change the world, then change is indeed happening. Time, as always, will tell…

Jim