The 15,000 delegates are feeling rather miffed about the absence of freebies at this summit. The Danish Government announced that it was “discontinuing the practice” of giving away tacky souvenirs, samples of local food and drink, T-shirts, hats, umbrellas and lots of other goodies that delegates normally received at UN climate change conferences. Lars Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister, told delegates that instead of spending $800,000 on 15,000 figurines of the Little Mermaid and other gifts, Denmark was investing in 11 scholarships for students from around the world.
Any visible sign of Christmas has also been banned from this rather cheerless conference. The Danish foreign ministry rejected an offer by Nordmann, a local company, to sponsor thousands of living fir trees in big pots which would suck up much of the carbon breathed out by the delegates. The ministry ruled that “Christmas and all its symbols” should be absent from the conference to avoid offending non-Christians.
The “Climate Express” was billed as the greenest way of getting to Copenhagen. The state railways of Europe used the summit to promote long-distance rail travel by laying on a direct service from Brussels taking 14 hours. The 400 delegates who accepted free tickets for the train would probably all now agree that rail travel is far more civilised than flying. This could be because their train was entirely made up of plush first class carriages, a jazz band entertained guests in the buffet car and free food and drink flowed throughout the trip, with champagne served an hour before arrival.
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There’s a tradition of ice sculptures at these climate change meetings, but does Copenhagen really need two melting polar bears? One, outside the national parliament building, is a local effort overseen by a Danish zoologist who fears that the wild polar bear populations could be wiped out in a few decades. The other, round the corner in Nytorv Square is the work of a British artist, Mark Coreth, who froze a 9-1/2 tonne block of ice in a Wembley foodwarehouse, shipped it to Denmark and carved out a bear. Inside the ice is a bronze skeleton - which is already beginning to show through. “In the end we’re going to have a pool of water, a polar bear skeleton and a grim message,” says the artist, who’s going to repeat the stunt inTrafalgar Square on Friday.
Both polar bears are officially low-carbon — Coreth says the Wembley warehouse was already freezing — but the same can’t be said for the Copenhagen conference as a whole. Despite the presence of two wind turbines, organisers say the summit’s carbon footprint is equivalent to some 40,000 tonnes of CO2, enough to power a medium-sized city for the fortnight. To offset that, the Danish Government is financing the construction of 20 super-efficient brick-making kilns in Bangladesh, which will save 100,000 tonnes of C02 a year.
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The UN announced in Copenhagen that it was “greening” the next football world cup by persuading the teams to offset the emissions of their flights. But it later admitted that the carbon footprint of the event in South Africa would be 9 times greater than that of Germany 2006 because of hundreds of thousands of European fans flying longhaul. Very few are likely to dip into their beer money to pay £50 to offset their flights.