Okay, for everyone who said to me "but wasn't Bali just a washout, anyway? Nothing really happened."

Yes, the overall declaration was watered down. But this post from global deal is a really good summary of the policy wins in Bali, showing how promising the Bali groundwork could be.

Okay, this is cross-posted from It's Getting Hot in Here, but I thought I might add it here too.

At the moment I'm sitting on a fourteen hour flight, the last leg of my journey home. My round-trip flight from London (where I live and work) emitted about 3 tons of carbon dioxide. When I started a Facebook group to support youth activism at the Bali conference, one of the first comments I got was "Isn't it ironic that you're all flying to Bali for a climate change conference? You're better off spending all that money on local climate change efforts at home." It echoed a sentiment I had heard from a number of people, including my own partner. I wasn't the only one going, of course; I was part of a delegation of 22 young Americans and approximately 150 people under the age of 26 attending the conference. I fully recognize that flying halfway across the world and staying in a big, air-conditioned hotel is hardly the most obvious way of living out my principles. So what possessed me to go? And what did I do when I got there to justify the expense and the emissions?
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Yesterday was crazy - after the usual morning meetings I bolted to the conference centre to catch the beginning of negotiations. i was holding a bag of squishy stress balls shaped like the earth and bearing the words "The other US is with you." The idea was to encourage the other countries to stand strong and ignore the US's obstructionism, as well as thanking them for their work so far. We needed to communicate that the delegation here wasn't representative of the US people, and that we needed strong, decisive action. It was really fun - I squishy balled representatives of Tanzania, Lebanon, the Seychelles, Bangladesh, Angola, Egypt, France, China, and the Prime Minister of Norway.

Once I had run out of squishy balls I went to see my friend (and current head of SustainUS) speak on a Climate Action Network press conference panel with the head of the Union of Concerned Scientists and Carl Pope. There was a great moment when a reporter asked, "Do you feel embarrassed by the way your government is acting in the negotiations?" "Yes," Erin replied. There was a long pause as the obviousness sunk in before she added, "Oh, do you want me to say a few more words about that?"

Afterwards we ran into the US delegation, who were holding their press conference after the US Climate Action Network (the panel Erin was speaking on). They all ignored us until Dominic and I started talking to someone from the International Chamber of Commerce, when they came over to say hello. Just seeing them there made me so angry. They're doing so much to destroy the negotiations - throwing in language that gains them nothing but breaks a consensus that 180 other countries had struggled to reach, insulting other delegations (and the world), and generally acting like a two ton idiot bull in a china shop. In the CAN Press Conference, Carl Pope pointed out (very slowly and clearly) that the administration has accepted the IPCC fourth assessment report, and delegation representatives have given presentations showing that they accept the science and not only that, they recognize the action we need to take to stop disaster. "They cannot be forgiven because they know exactly what they're doing."

Infuriated, I stalked out of the conference centre to eat lunch, only to find that I was sitting opposite Hilary Benn, the UK minister for the Environment. He got a squishy ball too. It made me feel better. So did facilitating a meeting to plan the youth caucus' last few actions, as well as singing our song at the Fossil of the Day presentation.

But the highlight of the day was a speech from Al Gore. He was AMAZING - really honest and emotive and wonderful and prophetic. It's really hard to try to describe the effect it had on me. It's not like he was saying anything particularly new - he was simply speaking from his heart, exhorting the delegates to take action and, more importantly, move around the roadblock of the United States. But I needed it so badly, I needed someone to urge the world to move forward because we don't have time to waste, US government be damned. I needed a champion. I needed the truth.

"In our country's darkest hour, our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, said 'The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. . . . We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.'"

So today I wrote a song and we sang it after the US won first place for Fossil of the Day today.

(to the tune of "America the Beautiful")

Oh Nusa Dua, the beautiful
Home of UNF triple C
In plenary and contact groups
Negotiate for you and me
The time has come, we cannot wait
The seas are rising fast
It’s time for action on climate change
An agreement which will last.

As Americans we are ashamed
At our country’s intransigence
Blocking REDD and tech transfer
And adaptation funds
Delegates of other lands
Don’t think they speak for us
We are the youth, we beg of you
Protect our futures now

Harlan Watson, don’t try to stop
International action
Two degrees bring droughts and floods
And tropical disease
America America demonstrate leadership
Commit to binding emissions cuts
From sea to shining sea
----

Also, I'm currently in one of the plenary halls waiting for Al Gore to get up and speak. I got a free teddy bear too!

Me, Josh, and the Climate Cub

My article in ChinaDialogue is up - exciting! My words are translated into Chinese! Also, there's a deeply unflattering picture of me accepting a Fossil of the Day Award on behalf of the US.

Okay, so here I am in Bali. And boy, is it hot! It's a little bit like swimming, only outside, and the water's in the air. The free bikes provided by the UNFCCC secretariat are a real boon - the faster you pedal, the sooner you get to the next water station.

I'm currently sitting in the main plenary session, listening to the head of the GEF bid to get control of the newly established Adaptation Fund - this is a BAD THING. The GEF is a bureaucratic, inefficient, unresponsive, pointless beast, and it sounds like it's going to render the Adaptation Fund equally useless... oh dear. Sorry for that wonky note. Also, the negotiator in this session from the Phillipines is great - she seems to be the only one who reads the supporting documents.

The negotiations are a bit crazy - as you can probably tell, it's incredibly arcane and it's impossible to keep track of everything. At the moment I'm in a delegation working group, two youth caucus working groups, and I'm trying to follow the negotiations about adaptation! Something's gotta give, not least because I haven't been for a swim since the first day I got here.

Hello you rare, gorgeous, and fiercely intelligent person who occasionally reads what I write. As you might know, I'm joining a group of U.S. young people going to a UN summit in Bali which will start to determine the future of the Kyoto Protocol. International action is our ONLY hope of getting climate change under control, so this is the most important meeting to happen in a long time.

Why a youth delegation? To put it bluntly, this is a problem created by the last few generations, but it's the under-30s who get to clean up the mess. NB, this mess includes massive natural disasters, the spread of tropical diseases such as malaria to temperate climates, flooding, glacier melting, the possible drying up of the Ganges and a possible global environmental refugee crisis. This sucks. We want to tell people how much it sucks.

The problem: The summit is in Bali! (Nice, you say, but the conference isn't outdoors. Boo.) And we're not. We need to raise a lot of money to make this happen - 20 well-informed, righteously angry young people buzzing like mosquitoes around a US delegation who want to stick us with the legacy of irresponsible industrialization and the Bush administration's failure to pull its finger out.

The challenge: SixDegrees.org is challenging organisations to get as many donations as they can in a week. The six organisations with the largest number of donations get matching funds which double the money raised. So it's not the size of your donation that matters, it's that you're donating in the first place. Can you afford five or ten bucks? (Hey UK peeps, remember your pound goes twice as far.) Please, forgo your latte in the name of climate justice. Or something like that. We need at least 250 donations to earn the matching funds, so that's 208 to go. We only have five more days! And if you can afford more than ten bucks, that would be nice too. We REALLY, REALLY need the support, and we promise to make it worth it.* You can use the box below to donate:



* For every donation that I know about (from one of my friends), I promise to find some way to put the US delegation on the spot. Sweetens the deal, eh? eh?

For more about the youth climate movement, check out It's Getting Hot In Here.