Sorry, isn’t this is where we left off six months ago? Whichever way you cut it, the non-binding “pledges” made at Copenhagen and since still don’t add up to a firm commitment to cut CO2 by 25% to 40% by 2020, needed to keep global temperature increases to below 2 degrees C.

Today,  many at the Kyoto Protocol Working Group at the UN’s climate talks in Bonn agreed with China. What we have on the table are Copenhagen’s “pledges”. They’re a set of bottom-up proposals, often ambiguous, some with no clear rules, different definitions. China wants top priority given to agreeing the aggregate commitment needed to cut emissions from developed nations. A target-based, top-down approach is the only logical way forward. Then nations can make serious national contributions to a common goal. Read more »

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The UN has reopened climate negotiations here in Bonn with a sharper, slimmer draft text and our text from Copenhagen on just transition and decent work still intact. What we want now is to see these ideas of stakeholder participation and green and decent jobs carried forward from the opening, aspirational parts of the agreement to the practical, operational issues of how we cut emissions, adapt to climate change, and invest the major new climate change funds.

Meanwhile, to be frank, Day 1 didn’t get off to a great start. Chair Robert Owen-Jones (Australia) failed to invite a civil society respresentative to address the opening plenary. Had he forgotten Copenhagen – what it was like for us to be forced to queue outside the Copenhagen conference for hours on end in sub-zero temperatures? To see Governments trying to force developing nations to agreements that were never going to deliver the necessary CO2 cuts? Read more »

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“We will have to keep on working at national level to ensure Governments commit to an ambitious climate change treaty that includes the principles of just transition & decent work”.  This is the message from the ITUC’s representatives in Bonn as the UN ends the first of the 2010 round of negotiations on a global climate treaty.

The Copenhagen Accord, remember, was silent on labour and human rights. So we need to meet UK officials again, to ensure that our case for just transition is made afresh. And as climate change impacts increasingly affect life and livelihood in developing countries (see Oxfam’s report), so the ITUC will want to join forces with human rights campaigners to unify our demands.  Read more »

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No going back on the 15% renewable energy target. New powers for councils as energy providers as well as savers. The EU to back a new Kyoto Protocol after 2012. If the TUC welcomes these national and international highlights in Labour’s manifesto, there’s also no doubt that it’ll all mean scaling up the active role of Government.

These are collective demands on us all, but especially on Government to show leadership. The 15% renewables target alone is a huge challenge. Installing a Green Investment Bank with much greater funding than currently envisaged becomes even more urgent. And bringing in new players, like local authorities as low carbon energy suppliers and loft insulators. Read more »

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Pledges from developed nations signing the Copenhagen Accord add up to a mere 19% cut in CO2 below 1990 levels. This is well short of the range of CO2 emission reductions – 25 to 40% – that the UN says is necessary to stabilise global temperature increases. Still, apparently there’s no need to be ”irrationally alarmist”, as Benny Peisner puts it. The blogmeister at Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation keeps sending me bulletins on how bad the science is.

As Peisner said in his heated exchange with Observer science editor Robin McKie yesterday: “In all likelihood, we will not know for the next 20 or 30 years who is right or wrong on the scale and impact of global warming…the debate has become irrationally alarmist.” To me, the phrase “in all likelihood” means “I am virtually 100% certain”. What, we’d like to know, is this based on, actually?  Read more »

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Today (Monday) ITUC General Secretary Guy Ryder called on world leaders “to meet again within months to meet the expectation of the world’s people and conclude such a treaty. We need a binding agreement that delivers a habitable planet, decent work, binding emissions reductions and financial support for the most vulnerable.”

The weekend papers were full of climate heroes and villains. What I remember of the last two days is the sense of increasing disorientation, anxiety, loss of control, anger (made worse by bumping into Nick Griffin). Where we once felt engaged in a UN process, however tenuously at times, we now felt enraged. An abiding memory is of human swarms in the scented wake of political leaders. Where are they going now? And Why?

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World leaders here in Copenhagen can today make history and give our children and grandchildren a fighting chance at a stable future. Working people around the world and their families are watching. They are depending on you to commit to a  binding agreement that delivers a habitable planet, decent work and financial support for the most vulnerable; an historic legacy, right here, today in Copenhagen. Read more »

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Our delegation were emailed at 3am this morning with the key points of last night’s top-level talks. Our key text on Just Transition stays in! But, as President Obama and other leaders fly in to make their final offers, the unfinished UN process will, we fear, give way to a political decision now being drafted.

In the UN centre, the Obama magic has arrived. Crowds mass around TVs outside the hall. Upright and direct, he says:

“Our ability to take collective action is in doubt, right now the conference is in the balance. We come here not to talk but to act.” Read more »

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Heads of state are now speaking in plenary sessions with limited public access. Our delegation has a handful of tickets to get in. Gordon Brown used his contribution to urge delegates to “make the essential possible”, the challenge of true statesmanship. He outlined the framework of such an agreement: Read more »

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Front page of today’s Financial Times shows the police holding back protesters dressed as clowns outside the conference centre. But the clowns can be happy – it feels as if they are running the show.

The crass handling of the Observer community. Effectively shutting us out physically and, it feels, politically. Yesterday, we couldn’t even get access to meet our own DECC Minister, despite walking miles in the bitter cold (no metro, there’s an NGO demo). Midnight, we learn that the ITUC has a nine-badge allocation for today and tomorrow. Back to the centre by 8 – it’s even colder after heavy snow. Made to queue again, in the open. But the phone rings and we are on to meet the UK at 1pm today! Read more »

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Driving snows, helicopters seem everywhere, either bringing in heads of state or monitoring demos, with FoE leading a blockade of the conference, we hear, because, they are denied all access to the conference. 

The situation is quite gloomy. We have never been so far apart so near the deadline. Rumours abound - that our PM has been in telephone conference with France, Germany and Sweden to unblock the conference. Read more »

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The US union delegation to COP 15 is twice the size of our delegations to the previous COPs in Bali and Poznan, Poland. Its growth reflects the growth of our interest and engagement as a union movement in climate change. The focus of our efforts with our union brothers and sisters in Copenhagen resonates with our own efforts to shape domestic climate legislations.

Since the beginning of our interventions, the ITUC and its affiliates has had the goal of injecting a social and economic dimension in what had been an environmental discussion. In simple terms, we want a cleaner planet and good jobs. Over the past year the term “a just transition” came to capture the ideas we were promoting in a climate agreement. Read more »

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