Tag: Becky in Bali

Another forty-hour travel day brought another delightful visit to the Taipei airport (this time including a stop in the Green Relaxing Zone, a sort of indoor park with massage chairs; I think this is a concept Taiwan should market on a grand scale), and a drastic shift from the insufferable humidity of Bali to the ice storm sweeping through the American Midwest and Northeast. Much of central Pennsylvania is still without electricity. Shattered ice, fallen branches, and live wires litter the streets–not exactly common around here, but certainly not unheard of. I was, however, surprised to see an email from my Indonesian friend Annisa, safely home in Yogyakarta, describing a remarkably similar storm there. In her grandmother’s village, a “rain of ice” caused some roofs to collapse, and trees fell on houses and in the streets. According to Annisa, this has never happened in her region.

Back in Bali, meanwhile, negotiations extended an extra day, and tensions were running high. This, it seems, was mostly because of the position of the United States, which was refusing to sign and generally making things difficult for the remaining 186 countries. At one point Yvo de Boer, co-organizer of the conference, fled the podium in tears. Delegates from other countries were booing and hissing the United States. Finally Kevin Conrad, a delegate from Papua New Guinea, told the US to either lead, follow, or get out of the way. Eventually Paula Dobriansky, the lead negotiator from the United States, agreed to join consensus, and everyone cheered.

A floating blue Earth balloon with a red swimming tube around its waist and a worried expression on its face hangs over the conference, symbolizing worries for the future of the planet and the need for a strong Bali mandate. As high level officials roll in, security has been tightening, the red carpet has literally been rolled out, and there has been a definite shift in energy. A quiet excitement, growing ever louder, has filled the hallways, a solidarity among everyone who wants change, a frustration that it isn’t happening, and a passion for somehow finding a way out of this mess.

The Fossil of the Day Awards, given out daily at 6 p.m. to the countries doing the most to obstruct progress during the negotiations (to the tune of the Jurassic Park theme song), are still a high point of energy for the youth, media, NGOs and many delegates, but the reasons for their distribution are increasingly depressing. The United States, which was previously low in the rankings, has pulled neck-and-neck with Canada for a litany of misdeeds the past two days including blocking consensus on both technology transfer (this basically means sharing technologies) and deforestation reduction. Yesterday, working with the great nations of Canada, Japan, and Russia, and tacitly permitted by Australia, they pulled the 25-40% carbon emissions reduction target (strongly recommended by the IPCC, a terrific team of Nobel Peace Prize winning scientists) completely from the Bali road map, its one piece of substance.

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A quick Monday morning downpour out of the humid haze obscuring the distant volcano marks the first real rain I’ve seen in Bali. A Balinese fisherman I met at a temple in Ubud yesterday told me this is supposed to be the rainy season, but no one can predict the weather anymore, which means it is difficult for him to fish. At the conference it is somewhat easier to predict: this week things are supposed to heat up, with leaders of all kinds of countries flying in. John Kerry is speaking today, I believe Wangari Maathai is on a panel tomorrow, Arnold Schwarzenegger is coming, and Al Gore is supposed to show up, but we may have to wait until after he receives the Nobel Peace Prize tonight in Oslo.

So, all kinds of world leaders will be here. But what about the people they represent? People of the world with no power and no money have the most at stake in the climate change debate, but they cannot come to this conference for those same reasons. Fortunately, there is a large Indonesian presence here, and a number of international NGOs have worked to bring the voices of climate change here to the conference. Putting human faces and stories to the problem of climate change makes it abundantly clear that this is not something that is going to happen someday in the future–it’s happening NOW. “Climate justice” is the word of the day, or rather, two words, with a tagline of “save our locals.”

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Past the guards with semiautomatic weapons, many security checkpoints, and my favorite statue of a chattering squirrel, inside the convention center many voices in languages I often don’t understand (though it’s really exciting when I can pick up some German or Spanish) are eagerly discussing deforestation, a major theme of this conference. To show how serious they are about it, the UN has granted this topic its own acronym: REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation in Developing countries). It turns out that deforestation is responsible for about 20% of all emissions worldwide, more than the entire transportation sector, and here in Indonesia, a country heavily dependent on its forests, deforestation has made it onto the agenda of COP 13 (that is, the 13th Conference of the Parties).

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Discontented murmurs are buzzing among American youth this morning amid the crowing roosters  and marimba music that seems to sing from the walls (though I quickly lose this illusion when it is replaced with eighties pop on repeat). Der Spiegel, a major publication in Germany, has learned from a US government source that the US is trying to block progress in negotiations discreetly by coordinating with China and India to prevent binding emissions levels. Also, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) and 10 Congressional chairs have sent a public letter to Yvo De Boer, executive secretary of this conference, assuring him that the US is indeed very much behind action on climate change, and insinuating that the US delegation is not representing the American people.

Fortunately, SustainUS has a meeting scheduled with the US delegation this afternoon, and they have been very busy framing questions and planning strategy, trying to balance diplomacy with a demand for action. Canadian youth met with their official delegation the other day, but the delegation wasn’t happy with the youth after recently being labeled the “fossil of the day,” an honor that goes to countries that obstruct progress during negotiations, especially after the media picked it up. But it’s a great way to keep pressure and a public eye on the countries that make the process difficult.

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Coming out of the clouds and flying over the mountains I was filled with a consuming desire to be in this place and I knew that the United Nations and the government of Indonesia had made a very politically savvy choice by hosting the conference here. How could anyone come here and not immediately realize that it is absolutely critical to protect this beauty and save the world? I was a little delirious from 40 hours of traveling and the cab ride took longer than it probably should have but I was so happy just to look out the windows at the lush green and the orange blossoms and the Hindu temples and the mopeds whizzing in and out of traffic and the children riding bicycles home from school and let the humidity and everything else soak through me.

After drowsily befriending the official US youth delegation, a moonlit swim on the roof, a crash course in UN acronyms, a relatively good night’s sleep and fresh papaya for breakfast it’s off to the conference and here we go.

I knew it was important to have a youth presence at these sorts of major UN climate events, but I always kind of thought it was young people barging their way in, insisting that their voice matters and needs to be heard. This is actually not the case. Ban-ki Moon, the secretary general of the UN, has named youth as the most important stakeholders in this issue, and at every such conference youth are given three minutes to speak at closing plenary, so we have to nominate a few people to speak on behalf of youth. Of all youth! This is tricky because we are not representative of all youth. We have many young representatives from Canada, Australia, and the US, a good handful from Indonesia, and a few from Belgium, Denmark, and South Africa, but that is it as far as I can tell. So with everything we do and plan, we try to have some representation of the global South (does anyone from Indonesia want to be on this committee?), and everyone is at least paying a lot of attention to our lack of diversity, which I appreciate.

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Note: As a part of the ENTS climate change theme year, senior Becky Dernbach will be reporting on her experiences and observations from the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Bali. Look for regular posts from Becky over the next two weeks.

Taipei is my new favorite airport in which to have a layover. So far I have discovered a garden of purple Taiwanese flowers, a modern art exhibit, free Internet, three prayer rooms for different religions, a bamboo hut honoring one of the Architecture Styles of Indigenous Peoples of Taiwan, and an entire gate decorated with a Hello Kitty theme, complete with pink and white Hello Kitty chairs and a large TV screening area with colorful bleacher-style seats. Rather than Buy Stuff and Buy More Stuff, the theme of most American airports, the message here seems to be Buy Stuff but also Enjoy Life, a theme I appreciate after traveling for 35 hours including a claustrophobic overseas thirteen-hour middle-seat flight.

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