By Andrew
Gilligan
Published: 10:55PM GMT 05 Dec 2009
On a normal day, Majken Friss
Jorgensen, managing director of
"We thought they were not
going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention," she says.
"But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report."
Ms Jorgensen reckons that between
her and her rivals the total number of limos in
And the total
number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen.
"The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol
or diesel. We don't have any hybrids in
The airport says it is expecting
up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its
capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to
As well 15,000 delegates and
officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders, the Danish capital will be
blessed by the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen,
Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles. A Republican US senator, Jim
Inhofe, is jetting in at the head of an anti-climate-change "Truth Squad."
The top hotels – all fully booked at £650 a night – are readying their Climate
Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted
caviar wedges.
At the takeaway pizza end of the
spectrum,
The Danish government is
cunningly spending a million kroner (£120,000) to give the protesters
KlimaForum, a "parallel conference" in the magnificent DGI-byen
sports centre. The hope, officials admit, is that they will work off their
youthful energies on the climbing wall, state-of-the-art swimming pools and
bowling alley, Just in case, however, Denmark has taken delivery of its
first-ever water-cannon – one of the newspapers is running a competition to
suggest names for it – plus sweeping new police powers. The authorities have
been proudly showing us their new temporary prison, 360 cages in a disused
brewery, housing 4,000 detainees.
And this being
At least the sex will be
C02-neutral. According to the organisers, the eleven-day conference, including
the participants' travel, will create a total of 41,000 tonnes of "carbon
dioxide equivalent", equal to the amount produced
over the same period by a city the size of
The temptation, then, is to
dismiss the whole thing as a ridiculous circus. Many of the participants do not
really need to be here. And far from "saving the world," the world's
leaders have already agreed that this conference will not produce any kind of
binding deal, merely an interim statement of intent.
Instead of swift and modest
reductions in carbon – say, two per cent a year, starting next year – for which
they could possibly be held accountable, the politicians will bandy around
grandiose targets of 80-per-cent-plus by 2050, by which time few of the leaders
at
Even if they had agreed anything
binding, past experience suggests that the participants would not, in fact,
feel bound by it. Most countries –
And as the delegates meet, they
do so under a shadow. For the first time, not just the methods but the entire
purpose of the climate change agenda is being questioned. Leaked emails showing
key scientists conspiring to fix data that undermined their case have boosted
the sceptic lobby.
In
As Mr Singh suggests, the
interesting question is perhaps not whether the climate changers have got the
science right – they probably have – but whether they have got the pitch right.
Some campaigners' apocalyptic predictions and religious righteousness – funeral
ceremonies for economic growth and the like – can be alienating, and may help
explain why the wider public does not seem to share the urgency felt by those
in
In a rather perceptive recent
comment, Mr Miliband said it was vital to give people a positive vision of a
low-carbon future. "If Martin Luther King had come along and said 'I have
a nightmare,' people would not have followed him," he said.
Over the next two weeks, that
positive vision may come not from the overheated rhetoric in the conference
centre, but from
And inside the hall, not
everything is looking bad. Even the sudden rush for limos may be a good sign.
It means that more top people are coming, which means they scent something
could be going right here.
The