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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Good news from our colleague Philip in Copenhagen. The hard work unions have been putting into lobbying prior to and at this climate conference look like they may be paying off. Stay with me for this as it gets a little wonk-ish, but it’s worth it, and we need your help to lobby Ed Miliband over it now!

Unions in the UK and around the world have been lobbying hard to include a concept called “Just Transition” in the negotiating texts, committing the conference to a fairer outcome for vulnerable people. Today, 15 December 2009, Ministers meeting in Copenhagen will have the chance to seal this fairness into the conference outcome. But it is still hanging in the balance. Read more »

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As snow falls over the city, suddenly, the gloom lifts! This email has just arrived from co-ordinator Anabella to the ITUC delegation:

Friends,
A new draft text for the final outcome of the whole work of the UN’s Ad hoc Working Group on Long-term Co-operative Action (AWG LCA), and guess what, the Just Transition and Decent Work (JT/DW) wording is in! It is not anymore under the shared vision, but in the preamble of the UN text. This is excellent news! Read more »

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