Paris - Days Six and Seven

Sean Penn: Talking about Haiti

So, just when I thought I had a workable approach sorted out - efficient, fuelled on espresso, comparatively pain free - OF COURSE all that stopped working.

As for the climate talks, they never seemed to be working until, almost against all odds, they did work. At least, on Saturday, as directed, the Parties handed in their homework. It was still a pretty rough draft - lots of "square brackets" as they say around here. What that means is, when a phrase or statement in the text is still under dispute, it will be put in square brackets. When they started this process at the end of the last COP, the whole negotiating text was in square brackets, every word.

The progress made since then and now is that maybe somewhere between 30 and 50% of the submitted text is in square brackets.

The half-in-dispute text was handed in at 11:14:16 a.m. local time (seriously, they track these things down to the second). The deadline was noon. Because 190 parties are involved, and each has a different ability to get the necessary work done, there was another document released at 6:30:26 last evening with ten pages of "addendum" - more words to be added to the text. Whether or not they are disputed remains to be seen.

So that's the best I can say about the fate of the world right now.

As for me, well, first of all, there's that state of emergency thing. Paris on high alert is prone to sudden and unpredictable disruptions in public transportation service. I've been full out stranded once already. Last night, I missed being stranded by one stop on the regional rail line.

There was an alarm in the hotel late on Friday night (I was in bed and deep asleep) and there's another one happening right now (as for why I'm not jumping into my shoes and fleeing the premises... I did that last time and I didn't even get out of the building before the alarm stopped).

After the java-fuelled fun of Thursday, Friday and Saturday were low energy and a bit blah. When you think that during those days I saw Mark Carney, Mike Bloomberg, Al Gore and Sean Penn, you can perhaps come to appreciate the strange pall that hanging around too close to the negotiations puts on a person.

Furthermore, I saw these people because they were making heartening and encouraging announcements.

For example, everyone knows that Sean Penn went to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake to help out. When I heard that I wondered how that would end, because the earthquake was only the most recent of Haiti's troubles. Would Penn cut and run when the news cycle changed?

Turns out he hung around. He may also have listened to people who gave him good advice. Haiti's fundamental problem is that it has been ravaged of all its resources and its people are in a constant state of crisis with or without earthquakes. Penn's announcement was about the restoration of Haiti's forests and with the forests its economy.

So that was cool. His quintessential cool move was to come on the stage, go to the composite board podium (everything is made out of wood chips at this COP), pick it up, turn it on its side and sit on the sideways podium to address the crowd.

Yesterday, as the negotiators handed in their grudging barely-a-compromise text, Penn and others spoke at "Climate Action Day." There were national leaders, non-government agency leaders and there were business leaders, including the CEOs of Unilever and Alibaba.

All of these people were talking about the action they are taking to reduce carbon emissions, increase resilience to climate change and lift people out of poverty. One guy - who sells solar energy systems to people living hundreds of miles from the grid in Africa - said, "I saw 1.3 billion people in Africa not as people too poor to help; I saw them as customers."

There is a lot of really great stuff going on. Cross your fingers and maybe these laudable efforts will also have a good global agreement to buoy them, support them and make them happen faster.