Conference of Parties 15, Day 8

Tuesday was the first day of the secondary badge system. We arrived early to get through security before the line became impossibly long. We heard that in the early afternoon the registration and security lines had become so overwhelming that they closed the Bella Center to further entry. People with both their identification badge AND a secondary pass were denied access.

Fortunately we were inside long before any of the complications to entry began. I attended a morning contact group of the AWG-LCA where a new text was presented. The new LCA draft was far more vague than the original chair text presented on Friday. Most of the mitigation section (already extremely vague and weak) had been removed from the text entirely and replaced by brackets "[to be elaborated]." It felt as though we were regressing in the negotiations. The CAN mitigation group worked furiously to draft a one-pager on the addtions/changes/deletions from the original text and what provisions needed to be added/changed/removed from the beginning. We had one hour to analyze and compare the texts and to draft this one-pager which we handed to party delegates as they entered the LCA contact group at 3pm.

Despite reduced numbers in the Bella Center, things were still busy. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Al Gore were both speaking at COP. (I chose the ticket for Al over Arnold.) However, two other SustainUS delegates and I were selected to receive tickets to attend the High-Level Opening Ceremony. The Opening Ceremony held in the Tycho Brahe Plenary room featured speeches from Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, COP President Connie Hedegaard, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer, Prince Charles, and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai. All of the speeches were encouraging and motivating (other than Prince Charles who was unimpressive). This was much needed as the stop and go negotiations, walk-outs, and limits on NGOs all contributed to grim expectations. Ban Ki-moon and Wangari Maathai were particularly inspiring; however, there's no need to present these lofty ambitions when preaching to the choir. We want action and progress.