Editor's note: Emily Grubert is a studies energy and climate at UT Austin and has served as a columnist at The Daily Texan and The Stanford Daily. She'll be writing to us daily from the climate talks in Copenhagen.
In line for NGO registration outside Copenhagen’s Bella Center, the site of COP15, I appraised my Monday morning. Cold, but not that cold.
The Romanian wind turbine blade engineer in line next to me said it’s his first winter in Copenhagen, where he’s studying for a Master’s degree, but that the weather here still confuses him. We chatted on and off, watching activists in red suits chanting “The number has been set/Pay your climate debt” during the next couple of hours as the cold settled in. Conversations lifted and fell all around us in line as we waited for the noon opening of NGO registration. Rumor has it that the line extended all the way to the end of the train station; I could see the entrance gate from my spot, so I was not eager to personally verify the line length.
Along with talk of the number of people at the conference—at a climate conference! where people are excited and involved!—drifted more serious comments about responsibility for environmental damage. About equity and justice. Also came more angry-sounding comments: about the responsibility for governments to make things right, and about big corporations’ failure to act altruistically. “The number has been set/Pay your climate debt.” Red suits and sunglasses held up signs calling out rich countries. The blame game is easy to play. And it’s easy to think faceless governments and faceless corporations are actively choosing to be recalcitrant in a way that individuals wouldn’t. But then the line started moving, widening and narrowing as it writhed, and the same people who had just finished condemning the world for perpetuating inequity and spurning altruism had no problem pushing people out of their way to get ahead in line.
And so I remain convinced that the effort associated with preventing the worst harms of climate change will be massive, but worthwhile: overcoming our instincts to appeal to our statements.
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