Another year, another climate COP, and a few more faltering baby steps toward trying to limit global climate change. But this time coal was in charge and it showed. I’ve been to enough of these meetings to know that there isn’t going to be One Big Event that will Suddenly Save the Climate, Just Like That. This was the problem with Copenhagen, a meeting that, frankly, was never going to do the job and where expectations were too high.
But every year, as emissions accumulate in the atmosphere and new, fossil-fuel-fired infrastructure is built, and new scientific discoveries are made, the more important these meetings get.
While Warsaw wasn’t going to get a Big Deal, it was an extremely important stepping stone toward the 2015 agreement which will be the closest thing to the One Big Event we’ll have seen in at least a decade, if not longer (since Kyoto?).
As one colleague said to me on the night the talks ended: “we got some things, and we lost less than we thought we would. But it wasn’t a major breakthrough, not with the amount of damage control we had to do.”
So what did we get at the end of those frenetic two weeks?
Imprisoned within one square kilometer of water, two hundred kilometers from land, our only point of reference in a black ocean the brightly lit deathship. Confined within an invisible line we must not cross. Missing our friends who must stay outside the same invisible line. We are never still – there is no parking out here and the tiller must be constantly active to keep us all here, the engine on idle. We do two hour watches overnight.
We’ve had lots of opportunities to observe operations on the drillship — often better at night when it’s all lit up. The difficulty is in interpreting what we are seeing. Support ships come in and out. Cranes transfer people in cages from one to the other. Other cages and pipes inside the derrick go up and down. Inflatables zoom around. Divers drop over the side of the NBD. I should have done oil drilling procedures 101 before coming out here. We understand they can’t while we’re so close but don’t know for sure. However, it is clear they are not drilling yet, despite saying they planned to start yesterday. Great statement yesterday from Labour leader David Cunliffe, about the huge risks of drilling — until you realise he hasn’t committed himself to anything. There is no policy to stop deep sea drilling. We need to keep working on Labour especially on the climate aspect.
