IN COPENHAGEN
AFTER a late night filing a story delayed by computer problems, I got off to a late start on Monday morning on my way to the Bella Centre in Copenhagen for the COP15 and climate change summit.
At the Metro station a full train pulled up and a voice behind me asked: "Is this the train to the Bella Centre?"
I turned and with a start recognized Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the body that finally produced the evidence to prod the world community into action.
I told him I thought he would have been in a car. "I try to have a low carbon footprint," he said.
The IPCC Chair commuting on the metro to COP15 on Monday morning - keeping the carbon footprint down.
PHOTO: Nirmal Ghosh
We chatted briefly in the train. He agreed that civil society had mobilized impressively to pressure world leaders to act to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Despite that though, he was skeptical whether "it will have any impact on the people inside" the negotiating session.
Several people around us figured out who he was, and during the brief train ride had pictures taken with him. He was good humoured and gracious, and I wished him luck as we parted at the station.
At the Bella Centre, the queue to get in was about 100m long and it took about half an hour of standing in the biting 1 degree Celsius cold and shuffling forward every few minutes, to finally get in. I was grateful it wasn't snowing; there has been some snow flurries in parts of Copenhagen over the weekend.
I couldn't help missing the quiet, green fields and open skies of Samsoe island where I and a few other journalists and energy experts had spent the weekend getting briefed on the island's amazing renewable energy programme. Look out for my story on that in The Straits Times.
This is the first of what I hope will be a series of blogs from COP15. The number of registered participants has swelled beyond belief, to 45,215. Of those 11,500 are delegates and 3,487 are media. But I'm told there will be some restrictions on entry by mid-week when leaders begin arriving for the climactic last 2-3 days.
Excitement is mounting, fuelled by civil society marches over the weekend which saw some minor violence and harsh police action on Saturday. Copenhagen has never before seen 100,000 people march through the city.
At the alternative Klimaforum in Copenhagen (the Bella Centre is in a suburb of the city) journalist and author Naomi Klein spoke to a big crowd last Thursday. Later on air with Amy Goodman she spoke of how the fate of the planet rests on a mass movement for climate justice.
"We can talk as much as we want about debt, and we can talk as much as we want about reparations, but they're going to laugh at us, until there is some movement muscle behind those concerns, behind those demands. And that's our task."
More demonstrations are planned this week. But as Dr Pachauri said, inside the cavernous Bella Centre it is a different world. Still, world leaders are under pressure to produce something meaningful to meet public expectations.
This week could still define the future of life as we know it.