The longest day

Today is (officially) the last day of the COP15 conference here in Copenhagen. The day Obama arrived. The day our leaders were supposed to "seal the deal."

It's been a day of disappointment.

I woke up a bit early this morning to head down to Bella Center with this guy Senan who's also been working for Project Survival Media. We joined a group of people shaving their heads to show how ashamed we are of how bad the climate agreement is right now. It was so cold I started getting dizzy, and it was hard to hold the razor between my hands I was shivering so much. But if there's one day when you can really say you've just got to toughen up because we're trying to save the world, this was it.

Getty Images has a couple pictures of the event, and I know Democracy Now was there interviewing people, but someone asked me afterward what the point was. I had to think about it. I have an ambivalent relationship with activism, because I only like participating in events that send a clear message, or that have a reasonable chance of making an impact. I don't know if sitting down with a sign that said "A Canadian looking for a leader I can be proud of" beside the ones saying "Climate Shame" has had an impact on anything going on inside the Bella Center today. But I do know this.

I know I can't sit by the sidelines anymore and hope someone else is going to take care of this problem. Tara Rowe from WWF gave a little briefing here today on the negotiations, and she really summed up a lot of everyone's feeling in the city today. There are over a hundred heads of state here right now in this "bloody grey and snowy city," as she put it, and haven't been able to muster up anything close to the kind of deal we need to arrest our emissions and stop these climate changes from getting totally out of control. Over a hundred heads of state. Mr. Yes We Can himself is here.

But neither he nor Hillary offered anything new in the past two days. His speech was completely underwhelming. Not only is the US commitment to 3 or 4 percent reductions by 2020 (from the real baseline year, 1990) a world away from the 25-40 percent reductions industrialized countries need to make, but both Obama and Secretary Clinton took their opportunity up on the COP15 podium to offer an ultimatum of all things. They've both talked about contributing to a $100 billion fund for climate change mitigation and adaptation in southern countries by 2020. But that would just be a contribution among those from many other states, as well as private sources. And they added the caveat that unless they got everything they wanted, they'd walk away from the table. Chiefly this means China would need to agree to the kind of accountability mechanism the US wants to track the spending of that money.

Speaking to a woman from the Brazilian delegation today in a convenience store, it was interesting to hear that she agreed that countries in the south need to be part of some independent accountability measures to track the climate spending. Otherwise, she said, the money was likely to go the wrong places - in Brazil, for example, to slip through the cracks of corruption. (And then she bought some orange juice).

But that's not the biggest issue. Emissions reductions, mostly from industrialized countries, need to be vastly deeper. We need to get atmospheric CO2 back down to 350 ppm. If Obama, working late into the night with negotiators can't do it, if President Nasheed and the rest of the small island states can't do it, if leaders from all around Africa, Europe, South America, and everywhere else can't do it... "If this is leadership," as Tara Rowe said, "then our leadership lies elsewhere."

I know I can't stand by the sidelines while our Environment Minister goes up the COP15 podium after Fiji's leaders and say with a straight face that an affordable deal is more important to us than their existence. How can it be that this many of our highest-level representatives, in the offices with the most power in the world, can't rise up to the greatest challenge of our time? This is, really, about all of our survival.

So all we can do right now is stand outside with torches to spell 350, like we did tonight, and remind them of the most important number to put in this text. And stand in solidarity with the climate fasters. And not let our leaders think for a moment they'll get patted on the back if they stand for a photo-op around a document that promises anything less than fair, ambitious and binding action to address the climate crisis.

We're being told the UN has asked negotiators to prepare for a stay into the rest of the weekend. Obama's holding a press conference in a few minutes. And we're waiting.