Australian silence echoing around the halls of Poznan

Another update from the halls of Poznan. They really are halls too. Huge great cavernous things with terrible acoustics and miles of corridors. Hollow rhetoric resonates powerfully, bouncing off the walls and feeding back on itself to create the illusion of substance.

As I wrote yesterday, the key thing that needs to come out of the Poznan meeting is a ‘shared vision’ for the negotiations. The “Umbrella Group”, in which Australia plays a lead role along with Japan, Canada and Russia, has been obstructing progress – largely through creating distractions or outright silence.

The Japanes negotiator spent a lot of time in this workshop explaining how lifestyle changes were the way forward (as opposed to reducing industrial emissions presumably) and he, for example was prepared to reduce his personal showering time from 20mins to 15 and only bath three times at the weekends instead of eight. You couldn’t make this stuff up, honestly.

Russia said: Its expensive to take much action because Russia is too big.
Canada said: Its expensive to take much action because Canada is too cold (Canada won the “Fossil of the Day” award for this act of brilliance)
New Zealand said: Its expensive to take much action because NZ has too many sheep but we will distract you with a lesson on Mitigation Cost Calculation 101, best summarised by this formula: mpi = f(mpenergy(i) x %energy(i)+ mpagriculture(i) x %agriculture(i) +..) If you’re thinking W.T.F.? me too!

Australia said: ? Australia? Hello? Anyone there? Could the Australian delegate please come back from the bar? Oh, you don’t give a damn and are happy to let the negotiations die a slow death? Oh great. And what about that election? And all the soaring rhetoric from Chairman Rudd about global leadership? And what about the reef?

It’s funny isn’t it? About as funny as trying to tell your children that the reason we let the Great Barrier Reef die was because we were all too busy laughing about the ineptitude of our politicians. These negotiations are serious. Crucial in fact. We simply have to get a global agreement by the Copenhagen meeting at the end of 2009. The planet can’t wait any longer – we are running out of time. The warnings from scientists are becoming more and more shrill as the impacts and pace of climate change become clearer.

Australia is acting as though we don’t give a damn about the future of the planet. Sorry, but the issue is more important than that, and Australians are bigger than that. It is not acceptable for our negotiators to distract and delay the negotiations and then, if they fail, jump up and say some formulation of “We tried are hardest but the negotiations broke down and other countries didn’t come to the party”.

We are in an awful mess with climate change. The way out of it is for rich countries like Australia to show leadership, set ambitious greenhouse reduction targets, and drive the negotiations forward. We voted for a Government that said they would take action on climate change – we need to start holding them to account.