How do you see it?

Posted on 01. Jun, 2010 by annac in United Kingdom

The UNFCCC is all about text. The texts are what everyone comes here to negotiate over. Pages and pages of legal speak laying out options for the things we could do to tackle climate change. One day we will all agree on the same text (yes I’m in an optimistic mood today…) and that will be signed off as the world’s response to climate change

They wanted to sign off on a text in Copenhagen. This was what they worked on for the last few years.

But we all know how that story ended.

So here we are back in Bonn.

However we haven’t just started working again on the same texts we took to Copenhagen. Last time we were at the UN in Bonn, in April, everyone agreed that the chairs of the two big working groups could go away and take all the text they had from the last few years of negotiations and work it into a new text.

Then start the negotiations here afresh.

Today as the LCA (long term cooperative action) and KP (Kyoto Protocol) negotiations got underway we heard countries speak about this new text for the first time.

I sat in the LCA plenary and listened to countries reactions. On the whole we had no major disagreements. Most countries were vaguely happy with using it. Which means we can begin to slowly move forward. However a few people did have things to say. The USA were unhappy because they didn’t see enough of the Copenhagen accord in it. Bolivia were unhappy because they saw too much….

For the next two weeks we will be working on this text and how we go forward with it.

Last week I read a speech by David Foster Wallace.

“If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important - if you want to operate on your default setting - then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying. But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: the only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.”

Listening to the reactions today made me think.

Countries only see what they want to see. They operate on their default setting. They could probably write what they are going to say in these plenaries without even looking at the text.

I could write what they are going to say without looking at the text!

Maybe it’s time for them to think, to really pay attention to the text and to learn that they have other options.

Because we all get to decide how we are going to try and see it.

Imagine if all the countries consciously decided to come to these negotiations, look at the text and be constructive. Imagine if they decided that getting to an agreement quickly has meaning and then acted on it. If they looked at how they could make the text work, not just what is wrong with it.

Reaching consensus on such complicated texts does not come easily.

If we are ever to achieve it we need to decide what we worship.

Is it our own sense of winning? Is it our own interests?

Or is it our beautiful planet and all the people who live here?

Tags: Bonn, climate change, Copenhagen, KP, LCA, postcop15, UNFCCC