Addendum: George Monbiot speaking

… and Polly speaking as well.

Ok… this is probably gonna be my last entry in this blog… After a horribly long train ride, ‘sweetened’ by a group of English and presumably French Greenpeace activists having a party in the compartment next door until one in the night, a two-hour something delay we caught in Hannover when stopping and waiting for a train from Russia we got the engine from (yes, this is globalization… the train’s cars were all frozen and covered by snow, and a strange bergamot aroma was in the air… weird… very weird) while our engineer decided to switch off our heating… I’m home in the end, in Cologne… so yeah… lean back for this last bit of my blog and enjoy!

I promised a couple of days back I’d comment on my return to DGI Byen a.k.a. Klimaforum these days. As you already know, there was no way to get into the Bella Center on Thursday and Friday, so there was not too much of an alternative to joining in the more left-wing folk. And this time, it seemed it would really be worth it, as well-know climate and environmental activist and journalist of the Guardian George Monbiot would be speaking. There were actually two people sitting at the speaker’s table in the end, George and Polly, an environmental lawyer from the UK. Her point was mainly that in analogy to the care a legal guardian takes for an underage kid, mankind or individual human beings should (all) take care of Mother Earth as her legal guardians. There would only be the need of an analogous legal framework allowing for eventual suits, and yeah, things would be pretty much settled. At least that’s what I understood from what she said… Polly was impressing and really determined (her favorite start of a sentence would be “I, as a lawyer…”), although I kind of perceived that her view was a bit too ‘idealistic’ for my taste. The whole presentation (mainly held by Polly) and subsequent discussion round (directed by George) left me with a weird aftertaste. I guess I’m just not idealistic enough for believing that it’s all that straightforward – and yeah, COP15 made me loose some of my childlike airiness, believing that ‘in the end everything would just turn out fine and all problems dissolve themselves magically’… like the proverbial Gordian Knot.

As I really can’t reproduce the discussion we had in DGI Byen’s orange hall/room (too complex, too many comments, too many strange reasonings/deductions), I post an interview Ronack Monabay (UCJS) held with George, which I retrieved from Klimaforum.

A short interview with George Monbiot

After a missed interview with the President of Maldives, I finally managed to interview George Monbiot -thanks to Hanshenrik-. Well known journalist and ecological activist, he writes regularly for the Guardian. I wish I had time to ask sharper questions but I promise, I will do better and longer next time. It gives us his rough impressions of the bankruptcy already announced from COP15.

First of all, what is your opinion of the COP15 talks?

It has been a complete wash out to be honest… It is absolutely hopeless. Cutting each other rather than bidding each other up, which is what they should have been doing, and just producing weaker and weaker proposals every day, as times have gone by. Some countries have done alright. The UK government has not been bad at all but the European Union has just disappeared off the face of the Earth. During the Kyoto talks in 1997 it was the EU who was really pushing it. This time they are nowhere to be seen. The real hero of the talks seems to be Lumumba Di-Aping, the Sudanese delegate who has really pushed the wealthy nations to pay attention to what the science is saying. It is ironic that it takes someone from one of the poorest nations on Earth to tell the rich nations who commissioned and paid most of the science themselves to tell them what the science actually says.

Do you think that your view of the COP process has changed during this couple of weeks? Were you more hopeful at the start?

I was never bursting with optimism, because I knew what the constraints were. We also have to remember that hanging over everything is the fact that the US Senate hasn’t made a decision yet, and is unlikely to make a decision that reflects the gravity of the situation. Until the Senate sings everything else is a dead letter really. But I have to say that even my fairly gloomy outlook doesn’t match the full scale of the uselessness of those cretins who are so far utterly failing to produce anything resembling a sensible agreement.

Do you think it is time for a all new political process?

Yes, I do. I think one of the things that is very striking to me is how little has changed in 150 years. The faces round the table are different, there are people from many more countries of the world than during the old negotiations when European powers took a map of the world and drew lines across it and divided it up between them. But there are simply no engagements with people outside those national governments. It’s just not happening. There is no process by which the people can feed their views into the process. We have got to move on from this model, where national governments who were elected for totally different reasons than the negotiations taking place here and assume a mandate to speak on behalf of all the people of the world without any reference to the people of the world. That has to change. The process is corrupt, it is exclusive. There is a complete wall between those who claim to represent us and the people, and it’s hardly surprising really that it’s produced so far nothing of substance.

Indeed, but don’t you think that it’s very difficult for governments to have any kind of public participation when actually a lot of the policies which they might propose may be very unpopular?

That is definitely one of the problems, I’m no champion of the UK government normally, but it is ahead of the people, unfortunately. You’d like to believe that it is the people pushing the people, but in the case it’s the government pulling the people, and it’s saying we are taking a relatively firm position on climate change, doesn’t go far enough but a relatively good position on change, because we believe this is the right thing to do and it’s saying we are taking a relatively firm position on climate change – doesn’t go far enough but a relatively good position on climate change because this is what we think is the right thing to do and is what our scientific advisors are telling us we ought to do. But we don’t see that massive groundswell of popular opinion saying these are the climate policies we want – deliver or else we’ll boot you out at the next election. It is a real shame. We should be seeing hundreds of thousands of people on the streets. This is after all the most important meeting that has ever taken place or it should have been because it is about the most important issue, about the biggest challenge humankind has ever faced. So where is everyone?

Supposing that it does collapse and nothing or a very weak deal comes out of it. How do we galvanize civil society and the public to gather energy together and focus on the issue once again? Is there not a risk that people forget about it and see it all as a complete waste of time after this?

That is the real danger once the excitement is over, the red carpet has being rolled up and the cutlery has all been cleared away then people forget about it and it loses momentum, the talks lose their thrust. And I believe that those people who are really committed to see action taken on climate change, we must get much more confrontational. I want to see a series of big confrontational non violent direct action across the world against the most carbon intensive industries, against coal mines, against tar sands, against oil refineries, against the banks and investors making these things happen. We need to see people thrusting this much more into the public mind and you do that by taking action rather than just by saying things.

What kind of links you see between the social movements and the Nation States?

The Nation States must be part of the process but there has to be a way by which civil society and the citizens can deliver their views to the Nation States and formulize what they should do. That is why I believe we need a world parliament but of course we are not going to get that between now and the next set of talks.

So yeah, I suppose you can pretty much estimate now what kind of discussion Franziska, Stefan and I sat in. In fact I wanted to speak up as well and ask (“I, as a chemist, like to do practical experiments… so please, everybody ready to abandon meat, flying and driving a car stand up…” just to see what would happen…), but George must have seen my cheeky face of a troubleshooter and never gave me the chance to have my five minutes of glory (but the two ladies just behind me, dammit). Well… perhaps it’s better this way!

It’s hard to depart… but I guess it’s time to formally close this blog. COP15 is over… I hope you enjoyed reading and will stay loyal – perhaps I gonna re-open it on the occasion of COP16 in Mexico next year!

Farvel og Glædelig Jul! (danish, Goodbye and Merry Christmas)

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