Her head is heavy on my shoulder as we bounce and lurch
through a series of early morning traffic jams.
I worry she will fall off the edge of the seat but she does not; the
next bounce throws her into my side and she slides into me. I am crocheting as we drive and keep my
movements to a minimum so I don’t wake her.
Sleep, I think to her, sleep.
----------------
I’m sitting in the main plenary room attending a stocktaking
meeting along with hundreds of other people.
The chairs of each of the three negotiating tracks and several high
level officials are seated on the stage, along with a handful of support staff.
TV cameras zoom in on the speakers in
turn so everyone can see them on screens flanking the stage. While the Chair of the AWG-LCA describes
ongoing challenges, the staff member attending him fights to keep her eyes
open. She loses. We all watch sympathetically as her sleeping
image is projected across the massive screens.
By the second week of negotiations everyone is
exhausted. The delegate for Swaziland
makes an official complaint: neogtiations for the SBI (Subsidiary Body for
Implementation) went until 3 am.
Multiple sets of negotiations are occuring simultaneously and small
delegations can barely manage to attend all of them, much less fully
participate without repreive for negotiators working on little sleep.
I run into a note-taker for the ENB – the official
newsletter that summarizes all the key negotiations every day – and she is pale
with tiredness. “It’s two weeks of your
life you never get back”, she tells me, “I didn’t get to the hotel until 6 am
last night”.
Two NGO colleagues are walking down the hall. They are
talking about demands facing the negotiators.
“I couldn’t do it”, the older one says, “I couldn’t work 20 hour days but
some of them just seem to thrive on it”.
The younger one retorts, “I know, just think of their poor families when
they get home”. “Oh”, responds the older
one, “you do realize most of them are divorced, right?”. Even the most energetic people have only so
much energy.
--------------
Today’s agenda lists over 120 separate meetings, press
conferences, and official side events.
This does not include informal-informal negotiations (although it does
include official ‘informal’ negotiations) or bilateral discussions that remain
unannounced and occur behind doors. In
one negotiating track alone I count 82 documents that negotiatiors have either
presented, been presented with, or commissioned.
The complexity of the task at hand is overwhelming and the thousands
of people here are all scrambling to make sense of it. Sessions are held on finance debates,
technology transfer, and commitment periods. Meetings and negotiations hammer
out on the details of ‘AAUs’, the ‘hot air credits held largely by Russia from
the first Kyoto Protocol negotiations. Countries and NGOs host water events,
discuss the challenges and opportunities of generating carbon credits from
forests, and debate strategies for supporting electric transportation. Ongoing discussions focus on carbon capture
and storage, alternative energy strategies, the challenges of including bunker
fuels in a global deal. High level
panels and small NGO protests highlight the complexities of carbon markets,
industry and researchers have heated debtes about competitiveness losses, and
acountants fuss about the need for clearer measurement standards.
At any given moment roughly 10 000 thoughtful, engaged and
committed people are in this building.
But the reality of the situation is that we are all being pushed beyond
our limits. This is beyond the capacity for
any one person. The challenge is that it
may be beyond us collectively as well.
----------
She wakes up as the bus thuds to a halt at the
conference centre. While she was
sleeping the Chinese business cards she was holding have spread across her
lap. I’ve never met her before, and
can’t see her name badge, but suspect she is part of the Chinese youth
delegation as I have met several of her colleagues.
She nods.
I nod back.
And we get off the
bus, two strangers who, if not refreshed, are at least as ready as we will ever
be for yet another day.
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