Delaying and de-compromising
Posted on 14. Dec, 2009 by Ole Seidenberg in Germany
Demonstrations in Copenhagen were rather peaceful
It’s been a far too wonderful weekend in Copenhagen. As my girlfriend has been visiting, I have naturally not got as much into the aggressive protesting mood I should have been in. The sun was shining, there were a couple of thousand colorfully dressed up people out there on the streets, some nice announcements.. and that’s about everything that I really remember.
Media - how could we expect otherwise - covered those few that were arrested rather than reporting on the generally peaceful atmosphere in Copenhagen. What was missing however was the feeling of absolute urgency. These days are so filled with creative ideas - on and offline - that you somehow feel overwhelmed by them, not ready to digest them to the degree they would deserve it.
Just today, the start of the second week, was another evidence of how little time we, the trackers, actually have to do what we came to do here: tracking!
I was arriving at about 9.00 am at the Bella Center - and found a queue that was longer than the Annex of the negotiation text (and that means quite something 
. I actually had to leave so that I could have another streaming with the ARD - or more precisely - with eins.extra Digital at 11 am. So I did and went to the Huset, our place for bloggers, aka Freshair Center.
There, we witnessed more strange things happening during this eventful day: The YesMen apparently have spread some really nice hoax of popular News Websites (among them the Wallstreet Journal, the New York Times and the Official COP15 Website!) with really similar URLs - sometimes hiding them behind shortened URLs like bit.ly and some media apparently picked it up.
Moreover, the G77 once more left the negotiations, reinforcing their call for a continued debate about the Kyoto Protocol rather just a single LCA track. It becomes clearer and clearer that there won’t be a bad compromise at the end of this confrence - it will rather fail completely. And to be quite frank: In case the European Union doesn’t move forward and put some serious money on the table, I don’t want this to be some kind of hypocrisy deal. Meanwhile, demonstrations continued in the city center of Copenhagen, where activists drew away the big CO2 Balloon that had been attached to the stones on the ground… I guess, they had their reason as well.
It’s been a very active day. And yet, I feel a bit paralyzed and don’t really know how to act, how to move forward from here. Well, Angela Merkel is coming soon, Norbert Roettgen even sooner. It’s time to prepare for those that have the power to implement. Let’s go from here. And try to keep up the good spirits, even though we don’t know what to measure them against. Tomorrow, at least, we got the so called “secondary badges” - we will be in - and be part of the “exclusive” group of those few being able to access the conference these days.