Bali Hopes

I am really excited about traveling next Thursday to the Indonesian island of Bali with Frances Beinecke, NRDC's President.   We will be joining the rest of the NRDC "delegation" at the annual conference of countries that are party to the UN global warming treaty.   

National governments will be continuing the work started at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and the Kyoto climate conference in 1997  They will be building the international superstructure for needed actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For two weeks, the ministers, officials, and diplomats will negotiate language in hundreds of pages of documents forming a roadmap for the next major phase of negotiations.  The Bali meeting will also set the stage for the next President hopefully to reassert U.S. leadership in tackling what is perhaps the most serious threat to international security we now face. 

Ten years ago, I organized the NRDC delegation to Kyoto, where the US Government delegation - which included my now-colleague David Doniger - shaped the first set of legally-binding promises to reduce global warming pollution.  Unfortunately, the US has never ratified the Kyoto Protocol now due to expire in 2012.  In this round, we hope the US will not only take the lead in crafting the next protocol - with new strong commitments by all governments - but also act quickly to ratify and implement it. 

But Bali is much more that just an international conference - a meeting between national governmental representatives.  It will be also "internet-al".   Advocates and activists, legislators and lawyers, scientists and experts, industrialists and entrepreneurs, reporters and bloggers will far outnumber the official delegates.  Every day I have been getting a stream of emails about various "side events".  Some examples are mayors talking about actions they are taking at home and officials in Colombia and Indonesia describing plans to slow the destruction of their forests.  There will be hundreds of workshops, panel discussions, and informal meetings which will stimulate, encourage, and inform needed actions around the world.   

It will be as though the internet has come alive - and through the internet you will have a front-row seat.  

Frances and I and the other members of our team hope that you follow our blogs as we chronicle and comment on our experiences at the Bali global gathering on global warming.   We will continue our hard-hitting practical advocacy to strengthen the international legal regime on climate.  We will be telling the world about all the promising efforts in the United States - in spite of the recalcitrance of the current Administration.  We will be taking on the challenging issues of reducing tropical deforestation - which accounts for 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions - and helping poorer countries cope with the climate change now underway.   We will be working with our colleagues in Canada to call attention to the importance of preserving the Boreal Forests and cooperating with our counterpart groups from around the globe.   

NRDC will be contributing to the growing global debate, discussion, and dialogue on the overarching challenge of our time.  There is no question that there has been progress in the last decade, but the pace of action must pick up.   Many scientists suggest that we have only a decade more in which to reverse the current trends and to begin to reduce emissions.  We know that it can be done.  Now we need to create political will to do so at the international and every level of our internet-al, globalized world.