Paris - Day Ten

I don't watch a lot of sports, so I'm not sure if following the climate change negotiations is most like watching professional wrestling or basketball.

Multilateral negotiation is a team sport where the exceptional skills of a few star performers still rely on the talented back up of less visible contributors.

It is heavily scripted. There's always a little extra drama for the home crowd. There's always a lot of money involved.

I have a couple of favourite negotiators, not so much for what they say but how they say it. One of the two biggest stars from my perspective is Claudia Salerno from Venezuela. She's strong and articulate in her "interventions" (that's what they call the speeches negotiators make) and she doesn't mince words. Not everyone finds the positions she takes useful, but she's really good at her job. She is fluent in at least Spanish and English, and I like listening to her no matter what language she's using.

I also admire the negotiator from Malaysia, whom everyone calls "Professor" but I can't find his actual name. He also takes unpopular positions, at least with some parties; other parties like his positions just fine. He is passionate, articulate, opinionated and humane - or at least that's how he comes across.

Other distinguished negotiators: 

For smooth delivery and resounding reasonable-seeming interventions, no one does a better job than the EU. 

The Party with the best mumble: Belarus. 

Best-looking negotiating team: the Congo.

Night before last, Canada's team, headed by Catherine McKenna the new Minister of Environment and Climate Change, made a clear report to the President of COP on the progress of negotiations around the "cooperative approaches" - which is the language used in the agreement to denote market mechanisms to achieve greenhouse gas emission reductions. Canada's team - the Minister, the Head Negotiator, the Chief Negotiator and the team specialist on market mechanisms - was comprised all of women, and under the bright lights of the plenary hall, with their tired faces and remarkably similar hair cuts projected on the big screens, they looked like a girl band about to perform a cover of "Roar."

Paris - Day Nine: Remembering Maurice Strong

NOAA's 3-D picture of planet Earth at the US Pavilion.

In case you're wondering if after ten years of wandering in the wilderness, of winning "Fossil of the Day" day after day, until the organization who awards these things just gave up because it seemed impossible to shame Canada, after a decade of siding with those who obstructed and delayed international action on climate change, if it seems beyond imagining that the international community could say "all is forgiven" and welcome Canada like the prodigal son ... well, wonder no more. The world seems happy to see us.

That the world has given Canada such a welcome at COP21 might have something to do with the work of one Canadian, Maurice Strong.

Strong died just the other day - November 27, 2015 - at the age of 86. Today, at the COP venue, I had the genuine pleasure of sitting in a room with a bunch of people who knew Strong well and remembered him fondly. They told mostly-true stories about his impoverished upbringing in Depression era Manitoba, and about his truly innovative work at the United Nations - creating the idea of global concern for the environment and the wacky notion of trading pollutants to save the world.

Everything people are talking about during these two weeks finds it roots in ideas Strong brought to the international community, even the one about having a convention that lasts two weeks.

Hearing about Maurice brought home for me the toll the past ten years have taken on the credibility and influence that Canada once had.

It is a testament to the life's work of this most recently lost great Canadian that he is remembered at this COP as Canada comes back to the role it once had, without forgetting that credibility and influence are earned, not gained on the back of nostalgia and sentiment.

So I'm happy to report that Canada's pretty awesome here in Paris. Canada's negotiators have championed human rights, the rights of first nations and the plight of the least developed nations in their interventions. Canada championed, and appears to have won the day on, the "ambition" of the agreement.

Not bad for the first month on the job. Maurice would be proud.

Paris - Day Eight

Window decoration on a Paris restaurant:
buy a bowl of soup and a bird gets a free pair of undies.

I'm writing this while I have some downtime waiting for a series of press announcements before, at 7:00 p.m., there is a public reporting to the world (as it has gathered here at Le Bourget in Paris) of how all the climate negotiations have been going today.

That makes for a long day. I was here at 7:15 a.m. (left my hotel at 6:30) so I could make it to the Environment Canada briefing at 8:00 a.m. The traffic gets sufficiently gummed up in the Paris morning that, unless I go really early, I never make it to the 8:00 a.m. meeting on time.

I assume I'll be hanging around until 9 or so before I make my way back to the hotel. I'll be in my room by 10:00 p.m. and in my bed shortly after that. Just in case anyone thought I was having a tonne of fun in Paris...

Well, yesterday afternoon was pretty good. It was my half day off for good behaviour. I still am not well oriented in Paris, and after I got myself going in the wrong direction for a good forty minutes, I discovered my error, grabbed a taxi and for less than 10 Euros and in less than 20 minutes was where I was supposed to be and only a bit late.

Lost in Paris: maybe because I was allowing myself to be distracted by all the pretty views.

I spent the afternoon with an old friend: had a fine lunch, walked along the Seine and the Champs Elysee, wandered around and found a cafe to rest and have a couple of glasses of wine. Then walked some more until we were hungry again, had a light supper and then hopped in taxis to go back to our hotels. That was a pretty fun day.

The next four days will be less fun than that, but, I'm here to do something useful, which means, for at least Monday, Tuesday and maybe Wednesday, hanging around to hear between seven and nine at night how far we have managed to pull ourselves from the brink.

The blog posts will be midday for this reason. I'll try to find something to tell you that's fun, interesting and hopeful.

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.

Paris - Day Five

I'm continuing to innovate as I try to get the most out of the fact that I am in Paris for two weeks on the tax payer's dime. I want to give you all good value for money but, I need some time for me too.

So, as an immediate improvement on what I described in my last post, which was, you recall, the process of taking notes furiously all day, making the trip back to the hotel and then sequestering myself for hours to turn notes I no longer understood into meaningful, insightful prose .... I have decided not to do that anymore.

Instead, I take the notes during the day and then immediately find a quiet spot to turn them into a dispatch. On the strength of a one-day test-drive, I would say this approach works slick as a whistle. I get my homework done, and I still have time to go out in the evening. Plus, folks on the home front are raving about the news. So it's all good.

As for what I did with my free evening tonight ... well, I'm in Paris for heaven's sake, so I went out with my companion the Environmental Commissioner, and the Special Advisor on Climate Change and his charming wife Trish, to enjoy a fine Indian meal.

Just around the corner from us is a place my companion said was in "the top1000 restaurants in Paris."

OK, because it's PARIS, being in the top 1000 is something of a distinction, I suppose, but it didn't make me brace myself for a life-changing meal.

It was a perfectly lovely Indian meal with crispy pakoras, bhaji that were a lot like little oniony pancakes, an interesting tandoori-style salmon appetizer, and quite decent paneer. The way I could tell I wasn't in Toronto was how mildly the food was spiced.

As for my day at work, I stayed away from the negotiations for the first half of the day. I absorbed the Environment and Climate Change briefing, talked shop and compared notes with my counterparts from BC and Alberta, filed my first dispatch, went to a press conference by the Climate Action Network, filed a dispatch about that, and then went to Environment and Climate Change Canada's mid-day public briefing where the same people have asked the same questions for three days running. I filed a dispatch about that, too.

Then I supported my Minister at a meeting with an enthusiastic Harvard academic who likes the idea of provinces sending money to less developed countries to make up for the money that is not being sent by national governments. He got a chilly reception.

Braced by my negotiation-free day AND a double espresso, I found a seat in an "overflow" room to listen to a conversation among all the members of the Convention. They had agreed to spend some time talking about the seven things they hate the most about each other.

It was an interesting conversation, but not a heartening or inspiring one. It was easy to forget, as the less developed countries complained about just about everything, that, at least so far as the science is concerned, the fate of humanity hangs in the balance.

The most illuminating moment for me was the long "intervention" by the negotiator from Malaysia, representing a group of countries calling itself the "Like Minded Developing Countries." He went on at great length about the injustice of the countries who have caused climate change now looking to the developing countries, struggling to bring their populations out of poverty, to solve the problem for them. He talked about the historical obligation of the developed world and maybe stretched or ignored some facts a bit to count on his fingers the great betrayals already visited on the vulnerable by the strong. He was, to quote a line from a film perhaps fading from the collective memory, "mad as hell and he wasn't going to take it anymore." When he was done, there was applause in the overflow room. A lot of applause.

I filed a dispatch about that, and then got on the subway to go "home."

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.

Paris - Day Three

How the negotiations look from the observer row.

For the second day of COP, I took it upon myself to be the LEAST bright-eyed and bushy tailed I could be, and to make it to my very first meeting as late as I could be.

I succeeded.

To achieve the first objective, I ordered "decaf" at a cafe last night and they very clearly decided to ignore that request. The drink they brought me kept me up all night.

I also walked too much for too long last night and really irritated my right hip.

So, wide awake until four a.m. from caffeine and random joint pain, I had two hours or so of sleep when I opened my eyes and said quietly to myself, "God DAMMIT, I have to be at the COP venue in TWO HOURS."

To achieve the second objective, I got myself cleaned up, had a protein bar for breakfast, chugged half a block to the subway station and ... took the wrong train.

Getting myself turned around took me the best part of fifteen minutes, which is exactly how late I was for the meeting with Environment and Climate Change Canada. Phooey.

Anyway, it was day one of the official negotiations and all the plans already laid for how the talks would proceed were blown out of the water because there's too much to talk about in too little time.

I know why there is not enough time.

First of all, no meeting called by the Parties to negotiate ever starts on time. People mill about and gossip and check their phones and fiddle with their other electronic equipment and wander off to engage in different gossip with different people and finally get around to starting the goddam meeting long after it was supposed to ... everything is at least 30 minutes behind schedule.

Second of all, people are long-winded and inarticulate in stating their positions. Bolivia doesn't say, on behalf of the G77, "Developing countries believe that it is properly the responsibility of developed countries to foot the bill for adapting to climate change."

No, Bolivia says, "Madame chair, thank you for the opportunity to (two second pause) I don't want to seem like not a gentleman because I am always the person speaking first (two second pause) but (two second pause) the first section of this paragraph (two second pause) I mean, believe me, I leave myself in your hands (three second pause) but the countries on whose behalf I am speaking (two second pause) the realities are that there is a feeling (two second pause) and I must respectfully not (two second pause) my colleague (three second pause) the United States (five second pause) we believe a different outcome would better serve the meaning of the text here."

And then Bolivia will say more or less the same thing three or four times.

This went on for most of the morning, and then for a few hours in the afternoon. I was at one meeting around three in the afternoon and a different G77 spokesperson was taking forever to say "OK, let's divide ourselves into drafting teams" when I'd had enough.

I was exhausted, in a lot of pain, and dangerously on the brink of an international incident, so I picked up all my stuff ... my coat, my cane, my iPad, my iPad charger, my phone, my long-strapped purse I carry my important stuff in to frustrate pickpockets ... and got the hell out.

I did not get lost on the way home and I did not have coffee at my evening meal. I am also planning on not spending so much time at the negotiation sessions tomorrow.

Tomorrow will be great.