It’s Tuesday again now and a whole week has just flown by!  I remember last Tuesday, on the eve of the big march in Copenhagen thinking “Blimey, I’ve not even been here half the time and we’ve not even had the big one!” and now here I am, it’s a whole week later, I’m back in Oxford and all that is behind us.

Last Saturday afternoon as I walked the streets of the Danish Capital, I noticed that everyone had already packed up to leave to get home to yuletide with their families and friends: WWF had dismantled their melting polar bear, the big Hopenhagen ball in City Hall Square was being taken down, the wind echoed around the Klimaforum, and the pedal powered Christmas tree had switched back to mains electricity.  Meanwhile, the grass-roots activsts were heading their various ways home, tidying up and having a well-earned ale.

There’s a lot of negativity about the outcome out there, but I for one an optimistic:  It’s clear that after years of preparation and weeks of negotiations, including the high-profile last-minute arrival of Barak Obama as he flew in to save the day, that the utter failure of our leaders to decide anything meaningful and the most blatent attempt by the US to fudge an accord that was instantly and universally derrided by fellow delegates, the press, activists and NGOs shows that they have not a clue what to do about the great issues that face us and have showed themselves to be impotent.

On the flip-side, the social movements have strengthened: together with people from the four corners of the Earth both inside and outside the process, from main stream NGOs to grass roots activist groups, from well-off westerners to those from developing countries on the brink of loosing their culture forever, we all stood together in solidarity, despite the heavy-handed police action and political repression and sent a message to the world: that we the people are strong and united in that strength; that what we need more profoundly than anything is a change of the system that is the power house behind social injustice, inequality and climate change.

Some have said that a new movement began in Copenhagen: I think that statement a little over the top.   The movement already existed and what happened in Copenhagen was that it strengthened and the world saw quite plainly that the global movement for social justice stood proudly united whilst the global movement for business as usual squabbled over what resulted as a damp squib.

I can only hope that next time they put us in charge.

Tags: cop15 copenhagen

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Corporate Power, Environmental Issues, In The News, Key Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.