Today was the first day of continuous meetings, back-to-back, except for a 90 minute period when I studied back at the hotel.  Each meeting was in a different location, and there were more than 20 offered.  I chose meetings at the advice of the NRDC staff.  The day began at 8AM and ended back in my room at 11PM.

The first was for breakfast at 8:00 at the Hotel D'Angleterre, the Grande Dame of the city, but having seen better days.  There are installations pertaining to the Climate Conference all over Copenhagen - on buildings, in temporary tents, on the side walk, in public squares.  The hotel is on one of the main public squares, usually filled in winter with ice skaters, but now with colorful globes of various themes depicting earth, its living beings, and the works of man.

The breakfast was hosted by the United Nations Population Fund, under the purview of the United Nations Foundation, which gained notoriety as the recipient of Ted Turner's infamous $1 billion challenge to all the other mega-rich.  The room was a grandly ornate space with high ceilings, 50 people, and a nice buffet.  The topic was an exploration of the predictably dire consequences of global warming to overpopulated and generally impoverished regions.  This puts a human face on climate change.  There was extensive consideration of the empowerment of women, that this is decidedly the best way to mitigate the societal impairment caused by excessive birth rates.  Interesting facts were expressed:     

• - 30 to 40% of pregnancies world-wide are unintended, 50% in the US (!)
• - woman in developing or poor countries are expected to suffer the consequences of global warming far more severely than the men, primarily because they are less mobile and "have their hands full"
• - women did not endure the assault of Katrina or the Indonesian tsunami as well as men
• - with the investment in women (which is relative very inexpensive) with programs of education, health care, birth control, property ownership, etc., the society becomes more resilient  

At 10AM, I attended a lengthy and thoroughly fascinating consideration of the effects of climate change on the oceans in a tent in one of the town squares.  (The 15 minute walk to it from the Hotel D'Angleterre was very cold.)  There are countless issues regarding the oceans, especially the arctic, and climate change.  Most prominent are sea level rise (drastically if the Greenland ice-mass melts), substantial depletion and eventual summer absence of ice in the Arctic, the cessation of the warm water delivery to the North Atlantic, putting the British Isles and western Europe into an ice-age (I can explain that if you wish - it's complex), and the acidification of the oceans by CO2 which results in the destruction of the base of the food chain and of coral reefs.  Loss of bio diversity is crucial in this context and is already happening.  Some 16% of mammals, 12% of birds, and 23% of amphibians have become extinct in recent decades.  E.O. Wilson says that it will take millions of years to restore meaningful species diversity and the species extinction will be the process which future generations will most regret - and resent!

The oceanography session went on for three hours, whereupon I want back to my hotel and read some of the material I gathered in preparing for the conference.

Another very cold 30 minute walk to the next meeting at 3:30 until 7:00, a session on the business-economic considerations of the energy sector, including energy efficiency measures and their attendant industries.  There is a huge opportunity for investment here and the attendees were mostly very savvy businessmen, investors, and analysts.  At the end of this period, Stephen Chu, the current Secretary of Energy, addressed the group.  He is a Nobel laureate scientist and exceedingly impressive.  Also expressing great hope in dealing with climate change primarily because of the promise of future inventions.  As he put it, "inventions are in the past".  There are more to come and they will be entirely new and answer to the needs of humanity, however desperate.  

Here are some visions from my walk to and from this meeting: 

(The green, windowed box structures contain various informational or commerical derivatives of the sustainability movement - "green food" restaurants, clothing stores, an exhibition of wind energy, on and on.) 

Then - and it had warmed up a bit after dark - a rather splendid dinner from 7:30 to 10:30 at a restaurant on the way back toward the hotel.  It was hosted by Senator Tim Wirth of Colorado, retired, an early environmentalist, and the profoundly articulate director of the UN Foundation.  There were some impressive foreign ministers there, including Prince Ranier of Monaco (studies the Arctic), Kande Umkella (?) of Sierre Leone, Helen Clark (Director of the UN Development Program and former Prime-Minister of New Zealand), representatives of the World Bank, Tom Strickland (Secretary of the Interior), and Jet Li (!), the Chinese film director who has become a sensation at home and spoke eloquently about the "one-ness of humanity", we are all a family and the earth is our home, etc. etc.  

Then I walked back to the hotel with Jacob Scheer, the senior staffer of NRDC's International program.  He's been to all of the international meetings, including Stockholm in 1972.  

I apologize because I rather threw this report together, it's very late, and I'm going to bed.