10,000 Bali participants add to greenhouse gas burden, critics say

“Emissions greater than a small African country.”

AP | Dec 5, 2007

BALI, Indonesia (AP): Never before have so many people converged to try to save the planet from the catastrophic effects of global warming, with more than 10,000 jet-setting to Indonesia’s resort island of Bali, from ministers to Nobel laureates to drought-stricken farmers.

But critics say they are contributing to the very problem they aim to solve.

“Nobody denies this is an important event,” said Chris Goodall, author of the book ‘How to Live a Low-Carbon Life.’ “But huge numbers of people are going, and their emissions are probably going to be greater than a small African country.”

Interest in climate change is at an all-time high after former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and a team of U.N. experts won the Nobel Peace Prize for highlighting the dangers of rising temperatures, melting ice-caps, ever-worsening droughts and floods, heatwave deaths.

Two massive climate conferences have been held in less than a month, both in idyllic, far-flung, holiday destinations, first Valencia, Spain and now Bali. They were preceded by scores of smaller gatherings. Bangkok, Paris, Vienna, Washington, New York and Sydney, and places like Rio de Janeiro, Anchorage, Helsinki and the Maldivian island of Kurumba.

The pace is only expected to pick up now, prompting some to ask if the issue has become a plague that is creating a “cure” industry?

No, says Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. Climate Change conference.

“Wherever you held it, people would still have to travel to get there,” he said. “The question is, perhaps, do you need to do it at all? My answer to that is ‘yes’.”

“If you don’t put the U.S., the big developing countries, the European Union around the table to craft a solution together, nothing will happen and then the prophecy of scientists in terms of rising emissions and its consequences will become a reality.”

The U.N. estimates 47,000 tons of carbon dioxide and other pollutants will be pumped into the atmosphere during the 12-day conference, mostly in flights but also from waste and electricity churned out by air conditioners at five-star hotels that line palm-fringed beaches.

If correct, Goodall said, that would be equivalent to what a Western city of 1.5 million, like Marseilles, France, would emit in a day, though he believes the real figure will be twice that, more like 100,000 tons, close to what the African country, Chad, churns out in a year.

Organizers said they were doing everything possible to offset the effects.

Host Indonesia, which has one of the fastest rates of deforestation in the world, averaging 300 football fields an hour, said it had planted 79 million trees across the archipelagic nation in the last few weeks.

“Our aim is not just to make this a carbon neutral event,” Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar said, “but a positive one.”

In largely symbolic gestures, 200 bright yellow mountain bikes were being offered to attendees so they could cruise around the heavily-guarded conference site and ‘green’ paper was being used for the reams of documents being handed out. Bins separating plastic and paper also dotted hallways _ a rare sight in a country where formal recycling is virtually nonexistent.

Optimists hope the Bali meeting will inaugurate a two-year process of intensified negotiations on a deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012 and required signatories to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an average 5 percent below 1990 levels.

But no one expects concrete results in Bali, with closed-door talks expected to turn into a battle over language and nuance, like whether to use “commitment” or “mandatory’.”

“We don’t need talk, talk, talk,” said Ursula Rakova, a 43-year-old resident of Papua New Guinea’s Carteret islands, describing how rising seas have destroyed once-fertile farmland on her island of Huene and split the land mass in two.

“For us to move, we need money to purchase land, build schools, build medical clinics,” said Rakova, who along with other farmers and fisherman were ferried by boat, bus and plane to the Bali gathering. “Our situation is before us. We need something tangible.”

In all, 190 countries are represented.

The United States is sending more than 100 delegates and all 27 countries of the European Union are flying in national teams, with Germany bringing 70 people and France 50, many of them observers, playing no formal role.
. . .

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