Well, the COP15 UN Climate Summit is almost at an end. I’m sorry to say I don’t know anyone who thinks there is any chance the world leaders will rescue the sad state of affairs as they stand. Personally, I think the last two days of the conference have been more of a photo opportunity than anything else. Apparently, the text that now looks set to be the “Copenhagen Accord” basically looks the same as what was leaked from the Danes at the beginning of the two weeks. You would be justified in asking what it was all for.

Yes, my blog from Copenhagen lapsed, I’m sorry, but here’s a wrap-up of how we went with our Australian actions.

I already posted photos from our little Aussie bloc in the main protest last Saturday, but the following Monday we were actually covered on page 2 (or 4, depending on the edition) of The Australian, sadly our only national broadsheet – sad because it’s actually a really crap paper. Anyway, yay to them for covering us!

Then our little story about our first day of action outside the Bella Centre was published in the SMH on Wednesday and got republished in The Age too.

We just found out yesterday that Celia’s little piece was published in this week’s Blue Mountains Gazette too – and surprisingly have received much more feedback about that than page 2 of the national broadsheet. Ah local papers, I love you. If you can believe it, I think the title was “Local Girl Does Good”. Beautiful.

We also came across a reporter from ABC’s Radio National on the metro one day in Copenhagen, with the Sooty twins (our inflatable kangaroos) under arm and he posted one of my photos with their latest Copenhagen update, online here.

Finally, GetUp had their camera at the main Saturday protest and featured us in their “COPTV” update that recently went out to their members. Watch the video here.

We took our Aussie protest, inflatable kangaroos and new chants to the Bella Centre a few more times in the second week, even in the snow. I have to say, I was, and still am, really unimpressed with a lot of the campaign, lobby and “activist” organisations who have been whinging about not being allowed into the Bella Centre. Okay, the world needs to know. Okay, we need observers there. Okay, we need some activists on the inside. Did the Danish government massively stuff up on the number of passes issued? Yes. Okay, it’s terrible that many people flew to Copenhagen thinking they could get in for the second week and ended up wasting the carbon-debt of their long-haul flight in their hotel rooms. However, did we need as many observers as there were? No. Should there have been limits on lobbyists from both the fossil fuel and environmental sides? Yes. Should there have even been limits on government negotiators and at the same time subsidies so that Tuvalu didn’t have one person there while Australia had 100? Yes. Anyway, what really made me lose faith in some of these people was when we were out near the entrance of the conference, singing a few Aussie climate chants. In a break, the crowd, some of whom to be fair had been queuing for six hours, starting chanting ‘let us in’. Okay, that’s reasonable. Then we thought we’d offer another chant since people were obviously in the mood & it helps with the morale:

What do we want?
Climate Justice
When do we want it?
Now.

Basically no-one joined in and shortly, we had several people telling us to shut up. So many of these people are here to urge governments to do more on climate change but they want the protesters to shut up? That’s a pretty funny kind of logic.

The second major action of the two weeks was on Wednesday, Reclaim Power, when the plan was to march to the Bella Centre and attempt to breach the perimeter, taking over proceedings and creating a People’s Summit on climate change. Could have been a great idea but I think it was a little over-ambitious and because many activists arrived only days before the action, along with the Danish police pre-emptively arresting some key organisers it ended up a little disorganised. Anyway, we marched with a few Aussie signs, though sadly Sooty had taken a hit and was put out of action. The whole protest was pretty positive and very peaceful on the part of the protesters. Sadly, once we arrived at the Bella Centre the police got a little edgy and sprayed a lot of people in the eyes with pepper spray – very painful – and bashed a number of people in the head with their batons. They even assaulted one and arrested a number of other people trying to exit the Bella Centre and join the protest outside. After some time it calmed down and we actually had a great time holding a line across the road on one side of the main body of the protest so that the People’s Summit could go on outside without police intervention. We had clowns dancing around in front of the police line, sausages being thrown to their attack dogs and a classic linked-arm rendition of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”.

What else happened to us in the last week? Our last days were put partly out of action when two of our crew, Mithra and Martin had their bag, containing their passports, stolen and had to go to a cop shop (ha!), report the theft, go to the Australian embassy, etc. So we might have had one more exciting action up our sleeves but it wasn’t to be. That day I went to see Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and Mohammed Nasheed, President of the Maldives speak at Klimaforum which was really beautiful and powerful. We were also caught in a riot (okay, that’s probably dramatising it a little) in Copenhagen’s free, autonomous suburb of Christiania. We were at an activist gig at a bar inside Christiania. When the gig finished someone announced that the front door was closed and you couldn’t leave that way because a riot had started and the police were firing tear gas outside. It’s hard to get an exact idea of what happened, but there was a big event in a climate tent there that night that was attended by many organisers from Climate Justice Action, the main group behind the Reclaim Power action, and the word was that police used a minor excuse to try to move in and pre-emptively arrest a bunch of people. This was resisted with fire blockades and broken glass which was answered with tear gas. Anyway, we got out a couple of hours later, walking through a weird scene with helicopter searchlights shining down from above, clusters of police in full riot gear and coach-loads of riot police in the surrounding streets.

So I travelled all the way to Europe, taking five weeks to get here with one of the big motivations for my trip to be here at the end of the year in Copenhagen for the COP15 UN Climate Summit. What was it all for?

There’s not much point in rehashing words that have been eloquently written elsewhere, so here’s an excerpt from 350.org (my favourite climate campaign, and these days there’s a lot of choice) which more or less sums up what I think would have been a good outcome for Copenhagen:

we at 350.org are fighting for a deal that is fair, ambitious and binding (FAB) — fair because developed countries provide at least $200 billion a year for developing countries to develop on a low carbon pathway and face the impacts of climate change, ambitious because the treaty sets 350 ppm as a target and demands at least 40% carbon cuts by 2020 for developed countries, and binding, because it will be a legally binding treaty, not just a political agreement.

We definitely fell far short of that, but there are some things to celebrate. Over 100 countries now support a deal based on bringing global CO2 back down to 350 parts-per-million, which is well over half the countries that were involved at Copenhagen. Also, many small nations, especially small island states had an opportunity, in front of a mass concentration of global media to present to the world the stark choice that particularly rich countries are making – unless we bring the world back to 350ppm and keep global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures – we are signing a death sentence for those people and millions more across the planet. The final piece of good news is that 1.5 degrees makes a minor appearance in the text as it currently stands – that in 2016 the goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees will be reviewed to see if we might need to keep it to 1.5 degrees instead, this is barely a win and more of a way to stop island nations from walking out of the summit. By 2016 it will almost certainly be too late to keep the average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. Update: sadly, all references to 1.5 degrees were removed from the final text.

Even though I didn’t expect much more from Copenhagen than what we have – essentially a political agreement with no legal power for wealthy countries to reduce emissions 80% by 2050 [Update: all targets removed from the final text] and no interim (2020) targets – it is sad to see that realised. It is sad that even with a mountain of scientific evidence for the crisis ahead of us and in the face of heartfelt pleas from countries like Tuvalu, world leaders still did nothing.

Our little group of individuals just wanted to be there to show that there are Australians who aren’t aligned to any lobby group or organisation who are prepared to come halfway around the world off our own bat to freezing Copenhagen just to have what small impact we can in the face of our government offering a woefully inadequate response and even trying to wriggle out of what little targets we have offered through dodgy accounting.

Update: Please leave your comments on what you think the next steps could be for the climate movement, globally, but particularly in Australia in light of Copenhagen.

Far more importantly, we came up with some new rhymes!

Aussie, Aussie, Aussie
CUT THE COAL
Aussie, Aussie, Aussie
CUT THE COAL
Aussie
CUT
Aussie
COAL
Aussie, Aussie, Aussie
CUT THE COAL

To the tune of ‘Skippy the Bush Kangaroo’:

Sooty, Sooty, Sooty the coal kangaroo
Sooty, Sooty, our coal’s gonna screw me and you

And finally, the brilliance of Waltzing Matilda:

I’m an Australian
I’m an Australian
We’re selling coal to the rest of the world
If we keep selling coal we’ll be watching while the planet burns
Come on Australia and STOP SELLING COAL

After an hour of that, we had tripled our numbers as other Australians in the crowd homed in on our progressive boganism.

Some of the media reporting of the event has been pretty rubbish. I’m not even going to link to the horrible, inaccurate crap that Australia’s ABC published. I’m going to go out on a limb and link to an article from FOX News in the US – I know, I know, it might sound crazy, but they interviewed us without telling us who they were and quoted Martin, so here it is, actually its a much better article than all the Australian media I saw: shame. Here’s another angle from the Guardian, though it says nothing of the amazing feeling of being there and shockingly doesn’t mention us! And here’s a blog from an Australian caught inside by the dodgy police tactics. We filmed by a bunch of TV crews and interviewed for Deutsche Weller radio and a couple of others, but didn’t see any Australian photographers or journos – where the hell are you guys???

Anyway, here’s a few of my photos from today – very sub-standard this time sorry.

Nothing says day out at the footy like an inflatable green and gold boxing kangaroo. This shot was taken at Copenhagen’s iconic ‘little mermaid’ statue yesterday and is targeted at the issue of loopholes that various countries, especially Australia, have been trying to get in to the final text of the Copenhagen agreement. We might here more in the next fews days from journos inside the conference, but you can read a little more about it here in the mean time.

After a quick placard re-arrangement, we snapped a second shot in support of a treaty that will bring global carbon dioxide in the atmosphere down to 350 parts-per-million. The Australian government is currently angling for a 450ppm deal as their ‘ambitious’ position. This is a death sentence for mainly low-lying island nations including many of our Pacific neighbours and would also spell disaster for the Great Barrier Reef and potentially a lot of Australian agriculture. Find out more at 350.org

Right now we’re patching up the ‘Sooty twins’ – our two inflatable roos – to take down to the Aussie bloc in the Global Day of Action on Climate Change march starting at Parliament Square, Copenhagen.

We also found our little actions spreading around the web in a few more places:

• A little mention in der Freitag, a lefty Berlin paper.
• Another video posted by Ove on Climate Shifts

• A photo & mention on a German blog, Wir Klimaretter

More actions to come, so keep on eye on my unfolding set of my COP15 photos here.

We arrived on the train from Berlin and as we lugged The Lurkers double bass, guitar and banjo through the streets to our activist HQ apartment I was amazed. The city is covered in posters, billboards and bus-shelters all talking about climate change in one way or another – deforestation, governments, politics, justice, oceans, targets, protests, actions…

Speaking of actions, our first little effort is under our belt. We went out last night and decided there might be a dearth of activity early on the first morning so we rapidly decided to throw together some placards. Sadly, this was Sunday night and pretty much everything was shut. Most of the placard production was put off until morning. Unfortunately, this resulted in wandering around for over 2 hours just looking for a marker pen! There’s a massive niche opening for activist supplies in Copenhagen – we eventually made do with multi-coloured white board markers from a toy shop for about $6.

Eventually we made it to the Bella Centre and set ourselves up outside the entrance with two signs:

C’mon Aussie 5% is KRudd

Aussie Coal Chokes Our Hopes

…and two Darling Harbour Classic inflatable kangaroos. Pure class.

Actually, we got an amazing amount of interest. As predicted, there was a reasonable army of journalists mulling around looking for some colour to spice up their stories of ‘conference starts, delegates queue to register’. Besides that, there were a lot of bored non-government observers waiting in a queue that kept on stretching into the distance.

Tragically, I didn’t take any photos while we were down there… too busy singing “c’mon Kevin, c’mon c’mon” and “punch above your weight Kevin” (yes, the kangaroos did have completely lame red boxing gloves printed on them).

Later, I remembered that I have a camera permanently glued to my hip and actually made use of that while Mithra was interviewed for the Danish TV DR1. We just found out that it was on the evening news tonight, apparently with an estimated audience of over a million.

Generally, I take the view that everyone’s contribution to change on an issue is a valid and important as part of an overall movement or campaign – and I still hold to that. That said, it’s been pretty frustrating observing a broad part of the activities of non-government organisations here. So many experienced campaigners are spending time in planning and strategy meetings rather than organising and mobilising. In normal times, sure, that’s a necessary part of a campaign – but here, now?! – surely the time for planning was a year ago, six months ago, hell even two weeks ago. A lot of the sessions and info coming out seems to be really entry-level too – again, important in a broader campaign in terms of inclusiveness, but if you’re going to blow the massive carbon debt of flying here, you should be well-versed already. To put a controversial hypothesis out there, it seems to me that a lot of people somehow feel that having the information first – being the first to twitter, blog or report back in a plenary about the minutiae of movement from the government negotiators is somehow effecting change and also elevating their personal status.

Is personal ambition crippling the potential of the climate movement in Copenhagen?

I know this post hasn’t been very explanatory, so I’ll point you to a couple of handy resources outlining what is going down inside the conference.

• Live twitter stream for the COP15 tag
• Guardian “Opening Day” Live Blog
• Guardian’s general Copenhagen blog