Seesaw Depressing Day

It's been up and down today. Went to sleep around 6 or 7 a.m. happy that the door was now open for an agreement, because the US had moved. We were waiting, then, for China to respond.

I had a bit of a suspicion that this might not pan out the way we hoped, so I sent a caveat to the Stanford list, following up.

P.S. In case it wasn't clear ... this note is not saying any of this *will* happen. It's saying that there's a possibility, a potential opening, so don't completely despair. Hopefully the Parties will take it up and keep working toward an agreement.

It's also possible that political exigencies will overtake what seems to be a real possibility. As Lily Cheng pointed out last night, the US and China both know what they have to do on climate. But there are definitely things that can still get in the way.

Then this morning, I awoke to reports that Wen Jiabao did *not* attend the meetings with other world leaders, including Pres. Obama, and instead sent another Chinese official. WTF! What is China doing?

This did not bode well. The rest of the day seemed to fluctuate, sometimes with pessimistic news, other times with hopeful notes. It was all just so unclear. I saw some articles that said progress was again possible, because US had offered funding, and China was showing "flexibility" on international verification. But then bad news about Wen ...

The whole afternoon, I just couldn't shake the feeling that the COP was failing, and we were going to wake up tomorrow morning with everything having imploded, no agreement reached, nothing close to what we hoped coming through this conference.

Later in the day, though, I heard news that Obama and Wen were meeting alone (bilaterally), so perhaps some discussion was happening. In news reports, the meeting was termed "productive".

Brief exchange with Arlo, Stanford's communications specialist at COP15 who is live-blogging the event. I e-mailed to him:

I'm only [now feeling] a little depressed, because while the window of opportunity is open, China is not moving forward to seize it. They're still holding rigid, playing a political game of brinksmanship. Given the constraints of its domestic political situation, the US has done something to hold open the door. Now we need the Chinese to reciprocate.

I have been hearing conflicting reports all day; some are very pessimistic, some are saying the Chinese are warming up. The Prime MInister did NOT attend the group meeting(s) with Obama, but later, Obama and Wen Jiabao did meet bilaterally.

It is unclear what's happening, Karim's appraisals seem very down, news reports aren't shedding much light except that there's a new draft text in case the conference fails. Sad.