A reporter’s job is sometimes fun and glamorous, often not. My trip to New York for “Climate Week” was not. It was, in fact, a bit of a fiasco. I had hoped to cover a Climate Group event on Monday but was told that I had to be there by 10 a.m., without luggage, for security reasons. This was all but impossible since I was coming up from DC that morning. So I watched a live stream of the event, which froze and skipped during an interview with Apple CEO Time Cook.
Meanwhile, I twice tried to pick up my UN credentials and both times found lines winding up 45th Street, with estimated wait times of about two hours. Crazy, no? The UN knows how many credentials, roughly, it will have to give out because they all required advance approval, and still it can’t staff its desks properly. These are the people want to oversee a global regulatory scheme to manage greenhouse gas emissions. Good luck with that.
I say this not to complain–I have a great job, mostly–but to explain that my less-than-sunny mood during the week might have affected my coverage. (I hope not but we’re all human.) I wrote two stories for Guardian Sustainable Business, one pegged to Tim Cook’s interview, which eventually found its way online, and another looking at the yawning gap between the rhetoric at Climate Week events and the reality that the world is losing the battle, such as it is, to curb climate change.
Needless to say, I don’t think it’s time to give up. I’d like to do some more reporting before coming to any conclusions but it seems increasingly possible that the US and China can lead the way to global GHG reductions, outside of the UN process, with support from the EU and Japan. Getting a dozen so-called major emitters to work on the problem might prove more fruitful hat another confab of 190 countries at COP-20-something-but-who’s-counting.
Later, I was heartened to read about an agreement announced this week called the New York declaration on forests under which governments and global companies agreed to bring a halt to deforestation by 2030. Again, I need to do some more reporting on this. but the commitments from such big firms as Cargill and Asia Pulp and Paper are signs that we may actually be winning the battle to slow or stop deforestation. A big deal, if true.
In any event, here’s how my story on Tim Cook and the Climate Group event begins:
Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple, possibly the world’s most innovative company and inarguably its most valuable – just ahead of fossil-fuel giant ExxonMobil. So his appearance at the opening of Climate Week 2014 on Monday lent a little celebrity buzz to a day which otherwise had a been-there-done-that feeling about it.
The climate change issue, Cook told a gathering of business and political leaders in New York, resonates with Apple’s workers and with its customers, which is why the company has moved from environmental laggard to green leader in recent years, winning plaudits even from Greenpeace.
“The long-term consequences of not addressing climate are huge,” he said. “I don’t think anyone can overstate that.”
You can read the rest here.
My broader look at Climate Week begins this way, and later references a new study on how the world is building coal plants faster than it is dismantling them:
Covering UN meetings is not a job for the faint of heart, and this week’s climate summit in New York has been no exception. Two-hour waits for credentials are common. Staffers are plentiful, polite and ineffectual. Barricades, private security forces and squadrons of New York’s finest protect the UN compound on Manhattan’s Upper East Side from unwanted incursions from the world beyond.
The summit itself consists of a series of carefully-scripted speeches from business and political leaders. They mix dire warnings with calls to action. Invariably, we are told, no country, company or NGO can solve the problem on its own; we must all work together. Partnerships are key. Climate is the defining issue of our time. The problem is urgent. The time to act is now. The future depends on us.
It is all depressingly familiar to anyone who has been to Durban, Cancun or Copenhagen for summits past.
“You can make history or be vilified by it,” says the newly appointed UN Messenger of Peace on Climate Change, as the official proceedings began on Tuesday. Why, it’s Leonardo DiCaprio of Titanic fame, who knows a disaster in the making when he sees one.
You can read the rest here.