Day 5: Friday, December 11

Update 11:24 pm

I am exhausted. Finally! Slept through the night and missed my alarm Friday morning which started me off late and in a rush mode. That is no good!

Today, the COP and COP/MOP were suspended because there still is no consensus on the contact groups, so there were no plenary meetings. Instead, there was alot of rumors about activity with the biggest one for me being the NGO party - are we really going to be able to get in?! The venue doesn't take that many. My guess is that tickets will go to the cool kids and delegations like mine will be unable to get in. Guess I will wear my dancing shoes at home and enjoy my iPod while singin and dancin in the rain! Oh Gene Kelly would be proud of my pun. Man I need to get a good night's sleep!

Due to said tardiness, I was able to eat breakfast and blog out my Thursday adventures. Which was nice. Sadly Becca on our delegation wasn't feeling well so she left to sleep off her tooth infection at her dorm room (fondly called the frat house). Feel better Becca!

I decided today to attend a bunch of CDM sessions. CDM stands for clean development mechanisms which are the projects that capture carbon and offsets can be calculated off these activities and sold on the carbon market. Due to the proposed California cap and trade program, which I had convinced myself I could write comments for the OC Sierra Club Global Warming Committee, I thought I would go. After attending the sessions, I now think I will leave comments to the experts. Oh wow. It is worse than tax law.

Short story on sessions hosted by the Gold Standard Foundation and Bhutan and the World Bank:

• They speak a different language that borders between financial language (bankese) and trade language (commercialism). It made my head hurt.
  
  
• Capacity building is desperately needed for most of the world - or for everyone who hasn't read these documents over and over and over - training of local personnel and lawmakers to understand the needs of their people and carbon sequestration projects
  
  
• Data collection capacity - software, hardware and trained personnel plus time to do the data capture, collection and reporting (analysis, who ever heard of that! Leave it to the World Bank.)
  
  
• If there is no increase in carbon emission targets by Annex I countries, there is no capacity for markets to even trade. There is too much supply and not enough demand.
  
  
• If California, or the U.S. for that matter, does a carbon market - then we need to figure out if it will have linkages (direct or indirect) to the other carbon markets. Inherently I say yes. If so, a host of other considerations that also made my head hurt. Now I remember why I ran away from anything that had dollar signs in the case study. I did like this from my notes: "if you link markets, contageous features of models will leak from one to the other."
  

Bhutan is working on a mitigation project in several glacial fed lakes in their mountains. Due to the altitude, all work must be done by hand. Due to rising waters, two lakes are threatening to merge. They plan to build a damn and create carbon free hydro-electricity. They have received a great deal of grants with a 40% domestic/60% grant funding mix to build the dam. Energy will be sold to India. What is interesting, is that off this structure and analysis - Bhutan has put forward the concept of "Gross National Happiness" as an index to evaluate projects. The index captures:

1. Economic development
2. Environmental sustainability
3. Preservation of culture
4. Good governance

I kinda like the concept. Not sure where it is going to go but they are investigating it.

The last session I attended was the PD Forum's session with the World Bank that I had to leave due to an aneurysm that I could feel coming on. What I got out of the session though was positive that the Bank sat down to developers and funders and candidly asked both how could they improve markets. And they had answers. Discussion is always good!

Fossil of the Day Canada times 2!  

Third place went to the EU for doing absolutely nothing when the world forum looked to them for leadership.

Second and first place went to Canada. First for keeping up with the 3 percent target and claiming it is science based. The second for Canada's Environmental Minister's comment: "Its in Canada's interest to replace the Kyoto Protocol with a new agreement."

But the good news is that CAN is making an impression. The Minister is now giving away the "Hot Air of the Day Award" which went to a Canadian group. We now hope that Jim Prentice would honor us so by giving this distinguished award for nudgydom to CAN!

Artwork at the conference

I wanted to include artwork from the conference more in my blogs. Here is one that is just as you enter. It really reminds me of Katrina and strikes a personal chord with me after my many trips to the Ninth Ward. Enjoy and check out what happens when I start messing with my aperture. Lighting for the artwork were red and blue lights hence the lighting without my flash.