The islands speak again

Met a girl from Fiji who was also on the Copenhagen to Frankfurt flight. She was working at COP with 350. She was disappointed and angry, and was losing faith in the UN. (I gave her the line about the UN being a collection of member states, so it was really the member states she should be angry with.)

Some of her thoughts:

- Weak agreement

- Completely under the control of the "umbrella group" i.e. G-20 -- other countries had no input

- Nasheed (of the Maldives) signed on! She was really mad at him for that.

• (I tried to reason that he wanted to keep the UNFCCC process together, that if he and other SIS had just abandoned it, the conference could have ended in outright failure. She said that he could have made a speech about how he was being forced to sign on, given the exigencies of the situation, but that he was not happy about it. Instead, he was highly supportive).

- Weak performance by the U.S. Disappointed in Obama. (We discussed Congress' role, how the US is not a parliamentary system, not a majoritarian system with good party discipline, so how the Senate goes is absolutely pivotal, and not guaranteed even though there is a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress.)

- China's obstructionist behaviors. Major revelatory moment here.

- Should we have a COP16 or not? Better or worse for UNFCCC to fail? (I pointed out that without UNFCCC, island nations and small countries have no say, it would just be G-20 dictating terms. At least there are some mechanisms for participation in UNFCCC)

- Funding ambiguous. ($100 billion in the Clinton speech. But public/private sources? Alternative sources? It's really unclear what all this means. The Fijian was also worried about how much will be from existing aid vs. new aid.)

- The whole "accord" is ambiguous. Not only non-committal, but even what it says is open to interpretation and not very clear.

- The outcome was way worse than anyone had anticipated. Have to go back to the drawing board and see where we go from here.