President Obama’s announcement this week that a binding global deal isn’t realistic at December’s Copenhagen climate change talks felt like a real blow. I was on my way to South Shields, Foreign Secretary David Miliband MP’s constituency, when I read the story. The Age of Stupid movie was being screened at the Customs House in Shields and I was on the discussion panel. A movie concerned with our near extinction from climate catastrophe on the same day that politics drags its feet toward a solution. What feels frustrating is that we’re only days from the Conference and yet it already feels like we’ve heard the outcome.
Of course this is politics and Obama is one of a handful of leaders saying the same thing. Perhaps we are better off knowing now that there won’t be a deal in 2009 before our expectations get raised. We dared to raise our hopes about talks in Indonesia and Poland and then…nothing. So surely a heads-up to prepare us for the long game is in our advantage?
But The Wave – the UK’s biggest climate demo on December 5 in London – is meant to send a strong message to UK leaders that they must return from Copenhagen with a fair deal in hand. So what will it mean now? Well, the same I guess, they just can’t return with it until sometime in 2010. We still need to show leaders that our ‘vote’ counts and The Wave is a good chance to do that. But we must also realise that we’re playing politics on the biggest issue the world has faced.
