The anniversary of Kyoto.

Today was the 10th anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol. It started out kind of badly and got progressively worse. As I was leaving my bungalow I crashed my bike into a brick wall—a metaphor for a day that turned out to be almost Shakespearean for its invocation of literary devices.

The morning started out with a press conference put on by Climate Action International, in which the Japanese environmental campaigner said that for Japan to undermine the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol, a great source of pride, was a violation of Japanese honour.

The Canadian daily press conference was held in a tent about a five-minute bike ride away. It was hot in the tent and the Minister was running a little behind, so we were treated to a presentation about some pretty neat Canadian climate change software by a gentleman that bore a strong resemblance in demeanor and appearance to those people you see on the 2 am infomercials for stainerator. When Minister Baird showed up, he had a tough round of questioning from the press corps. The Minister did make the interesting point that “unlike the United States, Canada supports binding emissions targets.” I tried to get him to clarify the global base year Canada wanted to use for plotting emissions reductions (1990, 2000, 2005 or 2006). He chose to remain coy, which is understandable because as soon as you pick a base year that is not 1990 (which is Canada’s assured preference if our domestic plan with a 2006 base-year has any significance), people will attack. I don’t think though that it is fair to use a base year of 1990 if we are going to making a decision today that is far more severe in its annual trillion dollar economic implications that we ever would have imagined in 1990. If we are going to make a bold commitment as the global community in 2007 (including those large emitters that did not make the initial modest at the time Kyoto commitment)--which we must do if we want to avoid “oblivion” in the UN Secretary General’s words—then lets make the base year current and the commitment in line with best current science, which the IPCC says is to ratchet down global emissions 25-40 per cent by 2020 from 2000.

After the Canadian press conference, I shot off to the Intercontinental Hotel for the Finance Ministers meeting where finance ministers and senior officials from 36 countries met for the first time ever to talk about climate change. Lord Nicholas Stern (if his nametag was accurate, he has been promoted from Sir) presented to the ministers on the economics of climate change. The Finance Ministers, like the Trade Ministers, agreed to keep the climate change dialogue going, including on the fringes of the next UN Climate Change meeting in Poland. Stern told the ministers that for $5 billion per year for eight years, it would be possible to build 30 carbon capture and storage coal plants that would not otherwise happen; that for $10-$15 billion per annum it would be possible to halve deforestation, which is responsible for a fifth of human-caused emissions. He also said the science was clear about needing to make 50 per cent emissions reductions by 2050, and that from a fairness point of view, developed countries would have to take at least 75 per cent reductions, which still leaves developing countries with growing economies and populations a fair bit to do—even with the public funds and their multiplier effect leveraging private funds.

India made what I thought was a rather unhelpful contribution during the financial mechanism part of the meetings, saying that a “globally harmonized carbon tax required internalization of greenhouse gas externalities by developing countries on par with developed countries, and is squarely in violation of UNFCCC principles.” In other words, the polluter pays principle is unfair for Indian polluters. Fair enough if we are horse trading, but when the stakes of not doing the job is human suffering beyond the scale of the worst crimes against humanity of the 21st century (including the more than 250 million additional defenseless people in Africa that will be facing drought), that’s not good enough India. There are ways if we put our heads together to put a meaningful price on carbon everywhere that offer cushions and financing for developing countries and we should exploring those rather than throwing up brick walls.

Back at the convention centre, people were celebrating the 10th anniversary of Kyoto with a giant chocolate cake. Weary of the saying that you can’t have your cake and it too, I took a pass on eating a slice, hoping instead to have the substance of Kyoto carry forward.

The next big event of the day was a panel of heavyweights to underline how climate change was not only the environmental challenge of the day, but also the defining human development issue of our time, according the UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon, who was on hand. Nick Stern was at this panel too, where he forcefully presented climate change as the defining economic issue of our time. The UN Human development report which was the centerpiece of the event called for a global convergence of per capita emissions over the next 50 years. This sounded like a good idea, but worried me a little. As emissions are well correlated to income, it implies achieving global equality of income (an ideal I deeply believe in), and I wondered if we might be walking into a trap if—even in a world in which everything is connected--we made defeating global warming conditional upon defeating global inequality, an even taller order.

After the event, they served a spread with mostly meat, which was unfortunate considering that meat and all the feedstock and transport around it accounts for 20 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions (climate change).

Next stop was the Canadian Delegation’s official side event. I got there and someone from EnCana was talking about carbon capture and storage but I could not hear him as the acoustics were really bad. In fact, you had to have a radio device on your ear even if you were only 40 feet away to hear what he was saying. They were handing out fortune cookies on the way in. There was one pile for regular people and one for media. Remembering the hard time the media had given the Minister earlier in the afternoon, I asked if the media ones were poisoned. I was assured they were not. I accidentally swallowed my fortune cookie message so I was unable to read it, but a few of my colleagues kept theirs. One read: “check your baselines.” Another read: “Canadian COP out. Scoop at the BICC free bicycles, Wednesday 9am.” A third said: “Beware of intensity-based targets.” At the end of the event right before we were supposed to hear from Minister Baird, it was announced that he would not be speaking, as he had negotiating matters that had popped up he had to attend to, which was his first priority. The youth delegates there were not happy going so far as to walk out and snub free food and drink on offer, which was substantially vegetarian in contrast to the UN event’s meatlovers menu. A seasoned Ministerial aide walked out of the side event with an utterly astonished look, and commented to me that “this was the strangest thing I have ever seen, and I have seen a lot of strange things.”

Rather than complain about sour lemons, I grabbed a glass of lemonade, and gave a proposal to Baird’s spokesperson on how to get meaningful and doable roadmap to Copenhagen on which China and the US could come along.

After, I popped over to the Kyoto party, but when I was arrived, I was told the Kyoto Party was over—I hoped this wasn’t foreshadowing.

On the way home, I almost ran over a black cat and on my kitchen floor was a moribund green gecko, for which a ceremony to celebrate his short wall-crawling life is planned tomorrow.