A First-Timer's First Day at Bali

Today, a herd of suits hurried past a handful of swimsuit-clad vacationers in the Nusa Dua resort area of Bali, Indonesia. Snorkels and flippers in hand, tourists headed for the sea. Briefcases in hand, perspiring delegates headed for the 13th Annual UN Climate Change Conference negotiations at the Bali International Conference Center.

Tim Annett at the Wall Street Journal has already blogged about the air conditioning situation at the event, so I’ll just focus on how excited I am about attending my first UN climate conference. (I’ll admit that I felt a bit envious of the beachgoers. How could I not? To the right is the scene I walked past on my way to work today. Tempting, isn’t it?)

But putting such visions of paradise behind the sea of delegates, observers like me and a swarm of media flowed into the main plenary for the opening session. By the time I got there, it was standing room only. Delegates from the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change filled most of the seats. NGOs and other observer organizations occupied a few rows in the back, plus just about all the available standing room. The turnout is already tremendous, and more are sure to arrive as we approach the high-level meetings at the end of next week.

The demands placed on this process are enormous: in a nutshell, formulate a worldwide response to climate change. The expectations for these Bali negotiations are considerable, including designing a process to negotiate an international climate pact over the next two years. In this context, today’s official proceedings were remarkably unimpressive. Despite laudable calls for fast action made in the opening speeches, a conference encompassing nearly 200 countries doesn’t exactly "spring" into action. Today, the official business entailed a lot of housekeeping.

There were, however, some shining moments and some “fossil” moments. The shining moment was the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol by Australia. The U.S. now stands alone in its non-compliance with the first international climate pact—a fact that greatly complicates its participation in these negotiations.

In contrast, Saudi Arabia offered today’s fossil moment. What is a fossil moment? The Climate Action Network (CAN), an umbrella organization representing many participating environmental NGOs, awards a daily “fossil award” to national delegations that are impeding progress toward an effective climate agreement. Today, the Saudi delegation not only stated their reluctance to commit to a negotiation track, but they also called for a climate agreement that would provide compensation for the intended consequences of climate change mitigation. In other words, they requested that they be paid for the oil that a climate pact would prevent the world from consuming. Fossil indeed.

Having offered these tidbits from today’s opening meeting, I realize that I can’t hope to give a full accounting of the day’s events. I’ve been going for 14-plus hours, and all I’ve told you about so far are the first few hours of just one of the official meeting tracks, which are themselves but a small fraction of the activities here. Many of the most interesting themes are being addressed in so-called “side events,” and particularly as we move toward high-level meetings next week, many critical decisions will be made in “informal consultations.” It requires a whole new language just to describe both the vastness and the nuances of the discussions occurring here.

I hope you’ll stick with me as I open a small window into the next 11 days of this critical beginning to a new global climate pact. In future postings, I’ll try to speak more on the less-reported side stories of the conference.

James Russell is the Sustainable Energy Fellow at the Worldwatch Institute.