Paris - Day Four

Global Culture: Paris posters for the "Breaking Bad" spin off and
the "Legend of Woodstock" - painfully, scheduled in January at the Bataclan club.

So I'm getting more efficient at this COP delegate thing. For example, I'm taking fewer things with me to the venue. Like my cane. It just occurred to me today to leave the stupid thing folded up in my knapsack. It stayed there all day. I felt unencumbered and my leg felt fine.

That innovation, and the fact that I had a good night's sleep, still did not get me to my first meeting on time today. The schedule said 8:00 a.m., but when I arrived ten minutes before that, they had already started the meeting.

"They", of course, are the team of Environment and Climate Change Canada negotiators, who, like all the COP negotiators, are caught up in the hamster wheel of forging the climate change agreement. These folks work fourteen hour days - from about eight in the morning until 10 at night - listening to and participating in painful exchanges like the one I reproduced for your reading pleasure yesterday.

I promised myself I'd break things up a bit today and go to a couple of side events. "Side events" are like mini conventions within the convention. A country, or an agency, or a company, or an association or non-government organization, will organize a mini-conference, featuring speakers and panels on a topic. Depending on all of the above, the side event can run for an hour, or for the whole day.

I learned in Lima that these events are a mixed bag. Some are awesome. Some are awful. Many fall somewhere in the middle - not truly terrible, but hard to get into. I find that if a presenter is not good at public speaking, or speaks English with a very heavy accent and unidiomatic pronunciation, it is really hard to stay focused. I randomly picked two - one at the very beginning of the day, one at the very end. Neither was awesome, but I learned some things - such as the fact that Ethiopia is building rapid transit systems for its population and will cut its transportation-related GHG emissions by 90%. That's good to know.

Now that the COP has started in ernest, I can't go on after work adventures. I have to come back to my hotel room and file my report, then type this blog, then send an e-mail to Bruce and then go to bed.

The situation affords me the opportunity to bring to the surface some thoughts I've had while riding the Paris subway. First of these thoughts is, you could take just about anybody on the Paris subway, magically transport them to the Toronto subway, and they would not look in the least out of place. Everyone in Paris dresses the same as people do in Toronto. They wear scarves the same and, although one of my colleagues said no one wears running shoes in Paris, they do wear running shoes the same as they do in Toronto. Their eye glasses are Marc Jacobs and Calvin Kleins; their jackets are Canada Goose (really). Everything Parisians wear is made in the same place as the clothes Torontonians wear: China or maybe India.

Then there's the game I played with my companion the Environmental Commissioner the first couple of days we were here, the "how do you know you're not in Toronto" game. I know I'm not in Toronto because there are soda vending machines on the subway platforms; there are vendors selling "hot wine" outside; there are posters slapped up everywhere in the subway for a film called "Baby Sitting" with a picture of a generic white guy actor posing with a baby ... sloth.


Alike, but different, too.