Fiddling while the world burns (and drowns, and thirsts, and starves and .......)

[marmar]

(Truthout) "The smell of inaction" is how Dipti Bhatnagar, Friends of the Earth Mozambique's international program director for climate justice and energy, summed up the atmosphere inside the giant Narodowy Stadium after the first week of the latest round of international climate negotiations, Conference of the Parties, otherwise known as COP 19, taking place Nov 11-22, 2013, in Warsaw.

Given that this is the 19th consecutive year of annual negotiations and with a meaningful global treaty more distant now than it was almost two decades ago, Bhatnagar's olfactory deduction seems likely to be highly accurate.

As the pervasive smell of inaction seeped like a suffocating gas throughout the inside of the conference, outside, the choking effects of coal smoke waft from all corners of a country that obtains 90 percent of its electricity from coal and whose government has pledged to keep it that way until 2060.

As if to emphasize the point, just on the other side of the banks of the Vistula River, a stone's throw from the international climate negotiations, another conference is being held at the Polish Ministry of the Economy. Intent on sending a none-too-subtle message to government negotiators at COP 19, coal industry executives have gathered at the International Coal and Climate Conference, November 18-19, to discuss the future of coal in light of climate change. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/20152-warsaw-climate-talks-go-up-in-smoke

[pampango]

1. More from the climate conference: Green groups stage walk-out at UN climate talks

Members of NGOs walk out of United Nations Climate Change Conference in Warsaw.

Environment and development groups together with young people, trade unions and social movements have walked out of the UN climate talks on Thursday in protest at what they say is the slow speed and lack of ambition of the negotiations in Warsaw.

Wearing T-shirts reading "Volverermos" around 800 people from organisations including Greenpeace, WWF, Oxfam, 350.org, Friends of the Earth, the International Trade Union conferation and ActionAid, handed back their registration badges to the UN and left Poland's National Stadium where the talks are being held.

Frustration with the climate talks has grown in the past two years but progress in this year's 'conference of the parties' has seen negiotiations deadlocked in technical areas, and rich and poor countries at loggerheads over compensation and money. Anger has also mounted over the perceived closeness of governments to industrial lobbies, and because several developed countries have reneged on their commitments to cut emissions.

Hoda Baraka, global communications director for 350.org, said they were walking out because lobbying from fossil fuel companies was impeding progress at the talks.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/21/mass-walk-out-un-climate-talks-warsaw