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By Noah Hodgetts

For added context to my previous blog post.

It is vital that non-governmental organizations representing civil society ranging from College of the Atlantic and the  Climate Action Network (CAN) to the Indigenous Peoples  are involved in the process for several reasons. The most important reason is to hold countries accountable and to push them to make bolder pledges. Civil society is a recognized constituency of the UNFCCC. Its presence in official proceedings  is necessary to make sure all parties are playing by the rules and not shutting out those with less power. Civil Society participation is also neccesary to give a voice to the millions of people who do not have a voice at COP and whose governments don’t speak on their behalf. Finally, civil society presence is needed in the proceedings to push for a fair, ambitious, and binding deal in Copenhagen for the world can’t afford to wait until COP16 in Mexico City for a deal! We need action now!

By Noah Hodgetts

Inside the Bella Center.

I’m going on three days straight sitting here in the hostel largely because I have been sick, but also because I have no place better to be considering that almost all NGOs have been shut out of the Bella  Center since Tuesday. NGOs have been forced to follow conference proceedings from satellite locations unable to show their presence and voice their opinions in official COP proceedings as mandated by the The Aarhus Convention, which was ironically negotiated in Denmark and which the Danish government has ratified. Excluding civil society is not only a disgrace,  but a violation of international law.

Although it is probably not my place to judge the Danish government as I cannot imagine the work they have put in to prepare for one of the biggest UN conferences ever, as  a planner at heart I would like to point out a couple of issues:

1. Know how many people your conference center can hold! Although everyone including myself wanted to be at this conference, it does no one any good to accredit three times (45,000) the amount of people the center can legally hold (15,000). That the Danes didn’t know this or see this coming is inconceivable to me.

2. Adjust to circumstances accordingly. With mobs of accredited people with badges  trying to get into the Bella Center, someone should be smart enough to separate the accredited and those seeking accreditation. That they had the same problem day after day and didn’t seek to remedy it is unacceptable. Even people with secondary badges had to wait in line with everyone else. And I was one of the lucky ones that only had to wait in line for an hour – some, even party members, were forced to wait in the cold for up to 8 hours on Monday.

3. Don’t hold an international conference, accredit thousands of NGOs and then shut them out of plenary sessions. Letting thousands of NGOs into the Bella Center only to let them roam the halls and attend side events is not why any of us spent countless hours fundraising the thousand-plus dollars we each needed to travel to Copenhagen!

I wish Mexico City best of luck in not repeating the mistakes of Copenhagen!

By Noah Hodgetts

My apologies for going a week without blogging – my laptop crashed at the conference on Tuesday, so my access to internet has been limited.

On Wednesday four members of our delegation: Rich, Taj, Ken, and myself had the privilege of visiting Samso, Soren Hermanson’s carbon negative island – a two-hour train ride and almost two-hour ferry ride west from Copenhagen. Although it was an exhausting four-hour journey each way, having the chance to see Samso in person was an awesome experience. Samso, unlike Mount Desert Island is accessible to land only by boat, but has a similar year round population of around 4,000 and is just slightly smaller than MDI.

Samso was able to become carbon negative in only 10 years partly because of Denmark’s Feed In Tariff which allows producers of wind energy to sell extra power back into the system for a profit. Soren’s efforts to make Samso the first carbon neutral and now negative island in Denmark had the benefit of only having to rally one municipality, rather than the four municipalities of Mount Desert Island – plus the National Park Service. All five entities would need to sign on to any effort to make MDI carbon neutral. Samso also had the benefit of receiving state funding, since the island won a Danish renewable energy competition.

Denmark maybe years ahead of the United States in mitigating climate change with its 6,000 plus wind turbines and 97% district heating throughout the country, but we share similar challenges and can learn several lessons from Samso. Most important is that we engage the community and stakeholders from all areas and make sure they are on board before proceeding with such an ambitious plan. Number two is that we need to emphasize that smaller is better in reducing energy consumption and transitioning to carbon neutrality. Number three is that it is possible to become carbon neutral/negative without reducing emissions from all sectors. Samso has offset island vehicular transport emissions from the surplus renewable energy produced by its 10 2.3 Mw offshore wind turbines (pictures coming soon).

Seeing Samso’s efforts first-hand has given me hope for trying to make Mount Desert Island carbon neutral and eventually carbon negative in the coming years!

I will be posting pictures from our visit to Samso in the coming hours. Check back soon.

By Richard Van Kampen

Sitting in the back of the first plenary meeting of the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) at the COP15 in Copenhagen, I wonder what kind of agreement, if any, will actually come out of this round of negotiations. I’m not pessimistic on the issue, however considering the progress of past negotiations under the UNFCCC, there is a significant amount of progress that needs to be made before an agreement is reached, and quite a few concessions that must be made by the developed world if that agreement will be fair, ambitious, and binding.

A major point of contention for many developed (Annex I and Annex II) countries has been their commitment under the Convention to provide financial resources that will cover the full costs of adaptation, mitigation, technology transfer and capacity-building associated of climate change in developing (Non-Annex) countries. The negotiator from Algeria summarized my opinion of the financial aspect of the negotiations pretty well while addressing the chair person of the subsidiary body this morning. He made the statement that any agreement that is reached will be pointless without sufficient financial resources, a simple yet important point to consider. While so much work has to be done in other areas of negotiations, the issue of funding could cripple any progress that is made over the next few days.

The Bolivian negotiator spoke, in his words, “candidly” yesterday comparing climate change funding to the funding of corporate bailouts that have been occurring in the United States over the past several months. In short, he put everything into perspective stating that if Washington can spend trillions of dollars within the US to bailout Wall Street, what is it to ask for several or even several hundred billion dollars in funding from all nations in the developed world.

What he said is we’re talking billions, not trillions; and this is on a global scale – and not about one country’s domestic policy. The burden to fund climate change actions does not lie solely with the United States or any one single country, it is a problem that affects every nation and will take every nation in the world to solve.

Why are the costs the major point of contention for US leaders? Theoretically, the US would be able to support the costs of all adaptation, mitigation, technology transfer and capacity building actions. As a citizen of the United States I would say that it is time for my leaders to pull their heads out of the ground (or wherever they have their heads stuck) and adjust their priorities. No one wants to inherit a world full of both financially and environmentally unsustainable corporations; there is nothing tangible nor any value in that. But, what is the value of inheriting a clean and healthy world?

Our senators, representatives and everyone within the US need to stop thinking with their wallets. Many youth present at the conference have been wearing shirts with the question, “How old will you be in 2050?” Personally, I think that would be a good question for every person to ask their senator, representative, or any political leader. The historical short-sightedness of our leaders and their willingness to sacrifice almost anything for financial gains needs to change, and the need for this change of perspective is urgent.

The value of their bank accounts most likely won’t be of any value to me in 40 years and doesn’t mean anything to me now, but the important and world-changing decisions they make within the next two weeks means everything. Their money won’t matter much to any of their children or grandchildren either, and won’t be able to buy them a cleaner, healthier world. The future of the world is at stake and if the decisions made within the next few weeks within the UNFCCC negotiations are made based on the wrong motives; it is quite likely that there will be no one to look back and say that we made a mistake or should’ve done something different. This is not a situation where we will get a second chance, or can learn from our mistakes as we have typically done in the past; if there was ever a time for our leaders to look beyond themselves and do the right thing, the time is now.