Nick Archer

Blog Action Day Climate Change - The view from Copenhagen

2009-10-15T15:35:44+01:00

How do things look on the frontline on Blog Action Day? Copenhagen is clear and cold - no global warming apparent today - and in some confusion, if I am honest.

Denmark's Chief Negotiator resigned at the weekend and its media have since been having a field-day speculating about, and digging into, the - undeniably regrettable - story. As an outsider, albeit a deeply engaged one, I conclude that you just have to shrug and accept that things are as they are and that nobody ever really knows until afterwards what the impact of such events may be. (In my line of business people are often desperate to be posted to country x, and only resigned to their failure to get there when a year later they acknowledge that, had they gone to x, they would never have ended up in heavenly y).

Another confusion is to do with how on earth COP15 is actually going to run. Who should turn up when? If I want a speaking slot on such and such a day, who do I ask? What do the Danes decide and what the UN? When does the High Level Segment begin, anyway? Behind all of this is acute anxiety amongst my Ambassadorial colleagues about hotel rooms. As for us - we have a No10 recce party arriving soon and they will want some hard facts. Today we have few, but soon we shall have more; the man from the Ministry tells me that there is a meeting in Bonn today at which much of this will be worked through.

Finally, there is the small matter of 'will there be a deal?'. Again, confusion reigns, stimulated by media reporting which naturally sustains itself by representing first one view and then another as the experts' best guess. Very often we in Copenhagen feel like theatre-goers watching Racine, conscious that the big deal-shaping decisions, like his plot-determining deaths, all happen off-stage: 'Sire, the new Japanese premier has committed to cutting his emissions by 80% by 2050' And so on.

I've always known that diplomats need to be able to tolerate high levels of uncertainty. Here we're all now putting ourselves to that test.

Copenhagen Calling

2009-09-29T14:54:13+01:00

After the Foreign Ministers' visit - my last blog - everything went quiet again. In the sense that our next VIP visitors do not arrive until 9 October, when Nick Stern is back for a Global Editors' Conference, possibly with Tony Blair (these 'possibly's are disconcerting but part of life). But my team continue to wrestle with the formidable logistics of a Prime Ministerial visit plus, and for me the public diplomacy work resumes its priority.

Some of this is selfish; at the Embassy we want to use our track-record to hammer home to our local contacts that we are their greatest asset in the quest for ambition. So I write a piece for Berlingske (Denmark's Times) Online which is deliberately and unambassadorially scathing about some of the defeatist noises heard from New York and Pittsburgh recently. And I continue my round of school sixth forms with my talk about the diplomacy of climate change (the two hundred pages of square-bracketed text in the UNFCCC text are always good for a cheap laugh; it was good to see Barroso pulling the same trick in front of a more distinguished audience a day or two ago). Sixth-formers - have I nothing better to do? Well, yes and no; it is a public diplomacy investment and it is good training - a trip to the intellectual gym - dealing with their questions and explaining ourselves in layman's terms.

This last weekend at the Opposition (Danish Labour's) party conference there were further chances to spread the word, and to listen to an Opposition in that classic bind - suporting government policy but not wanting to say a nice word about government. 'We support them but we wish they were doing more and had got serious earlier...' the equally time-honoured way through that one. This against a background of concern on the other side that the new Prime Minister is spending too much time on COP15 for his electoral good. Which is where the PD work, and private messaging to contacts, becomes more serious. Governments and Embassies like ours need to keep saying that it is worthwhile, that Denmark does have moral authority, that - US healthcare notwithstanding - we should keep on keeping on, as I think Bob Dylan put it...

Forcing the pace

2009-09-09T18:03:21+01:00

Nobody wants an ambitious deal here in December more than the Danes. Partly because their reputation is at stake, but mainly because they know how important it is. They have funded Bjørn Lomborg for some years to make the sceptics’ case (perhaps taking a commitment to open debate a bit far) but he is losing the argument: industry is betting on a low-carbon future, government on a green recovery, and people in general see that responsible living is no hardship. On the contrary.

Which is where the Foreign Ministers come – march – in. This is a small country of 5.4m people. It has watched with increasing concern as deadlines for agreement on EU financing have slipped; recession has become an excuse for procrastination; influential voices say that maybe partial agreement is the best we can hope for this year; Obama has become bogged down in healthcare reform. Denmark cannot fight back alone.

Well, here comes some help. Britain’s stock is already high, because we have been forcing the pace. The Stern Review; the Climate Change Act; the Prime Minister’s financing speech. And now we’re convening serious European Foreign Ministers to try to get more ambition into the global debate. Let’s hope tomorrow has that impact. In the meantime, I’d better get my head around the Danish energy statistics (28% of its electricity, but only 17% of its total energy, from renewables and so on) in the sure knowledge that ministers always ask for the fact you cannot remember, particularly on arrival just before midnight or in the early morning after a short night…