Dao of the Planet: My Copenhagen Day 3

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

My Copenhagen Day 3

So I’d got time and internet to spend some time to recap my past three days before fresh memories slip away. It has been absolutely crazy here in terms of the amount of information poured in and people I talked to, name cards given and received, translation I did for the official team blog, so on and so forth.

I have to say what I gathered these days are rather miscellaneous, just the way things are presented here at the conference. UN has planetary sessions of meetings open to all participants every day. People can even just sit on the side floors, and take photos whever you want, as long as you don’t disturb others and go to podium to disrupt the chair of the session… It was in effect very hard to follow exactly as the things they discussed are rather technical and often follow-ups/sum-ups of previous discussions during earlier various talks. One thing that I was present and was actually able to understand well was about if carbon capturing and sequestration (CCS) should be included under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

Most developing countries [I have the recording that I can trace back exactly which countries said so, but not now] expressed the concerns over CCS as an immature and rather controversial technology to be added. CCS is basically the capturing of CO2 from burning of fossil fuels before it emits into the atmosphere, and storing it underground or sell for other purposes, such as injecting into your soda or to get more oil out of the field (tar sand as well I think). There are concerns about the instability of the injection at underground level and the long-term leakage of it from the ground. Several developed countries (e.g. Sweden and Australia) advocated for its enlistment as they have enough data to support the feasibility of such technology. Kuwait, interestingly, cried for serious consideration of the technology, as they’ve studies to prove its feasibility; they have none CDM projects and CCS is their one shot, blah blah blah (Okay, you can see I am strongly biased..). they requested the floor four times during the discussion to restate and accentuate their strong adaptation. I was not really buying their saying first for reasons stated above. And second, think about the Kuwait as a major oil-fed country, how much more oil and more coal they can burn with CCS?

Yet I still think it is a complicated issue, considering the possibility of getting funding for developing countries to either build new coal-fired plants with CCS or retrofitting old ones (less technologically feasible). It is a good thing if something could be done to mitigate the climate change effect of the coal burning but it is absolutely not a radical solution and even giving excuse to continue using coal. Coal addicts and many more, just feel it is stupid not to use up the reserves. Yet in a longer term it will affect the development of renewable energies for sure. As long as there are “alternative” options such as coal, there is less incentives to have the renewable, which are more like the common sense to me.

Okay this went a little bit long. I talked on when it gets into my expertise. Talk about the team now and our two major campaign events. I will direct you here with our official blog and it has detailed.

The first one was Green China initiatives, together with a Chinese entrepreneurs foundation at http://chinayouthcop15.blogspot.com/2009/12/green-china-youth-action.html(translated by me :)

I have to say I was not active in taking pictures but very happy to explain to reporters about what was going on.

The second one was the Traditional Chinese medicine prescription for a healthier earth. http://chinayouthcop15.blog.sohu.com/139201967.html (only Chinese version available now) The New Beijing Newspaper even interviewed me about my personal story with Copenhagen.

There are also many inspiring folks I talked. Many are doing hands-on work in the field that I am very interested and doing research (well I guess I could say I was attractive to them). Just name two most important folks here for now, the special regional director Wang (a Chinese) and communication director (an Indian), both of whom I met in Beijing while working for the China Youth Climate Action Network (CYCAN) and was lucky enough to meet them again here. I brought up my interest of working for UNEP, besides other important matter as well. They both were happy to see me in Nairobi as an intern. So all good faith, UNEP, as my life epicenter, came a little bit early as I had expected. We I don’t know yet. We’ll see.

I just realize the Bella Center opens for 24 hours, meaning seriously you can bring your pillows here if you want. But I still decide to go back to take a hot shower and sleep on my bed. I will try to keep up.