Well, I arrived here on Friday night, after a long day's traveling, and on Saturday morning I went down to the big Palais, where it's all happening. It's minus 17 in the streets, with the wind-chill, and definitely not something a wimpy BC'er from Victoria is used to, even though I once spent a winter in Winnipeg.

Luckily I bumped into Jenny Fraser, a good friend who works with the BC Ministry of Environment on climate adaptation, and she "showed me the works and got me oriented." When you are among 10,000 people, and there are six to ten simultaneous meetings going on, and 50 different groups and delegations, all with their own schedule of events, it takes some orienting!

The "real" event is taking place behind closed doors, as the country delegations work their way through the legal clauses and mechanisms of the COP and MOP processes. The big story (the only story) here is the heavyweight attempt by the USD administration to make sure that there IS no commitment to continue with Kyoto after 2012, except perhaps as a voluntary thing. Since all agreements are made by consensus, and since the US sits at the table of the UN Framework Convention on Climate change (which George Bush senior signed in 1992), the US is still at the table, and able to use their influence (including, we presume, outright threats and bribes) to try to get their way.

The NGO community here is highly organized, with daily meetings, and working groups on each of the various clauses of Kyoto that are being further worked on, and further groups trying to gain information from the different regional groups (eg Africa Group, South America group, G77). The flip side of this is that the way they explain things is VERY obscure and hard to follow, unless you've done a LOT of homework in the technical and legal side of the various clauses.

Basically, however, it is not the goals of this COP-11 to decide on what levels of reduction there should be after 2012. That will come later. Our job here is to make sure that there IS a later, or that there is an agreement to continue with a Kyoto-style negotiation framework to follow 2012. And on whether we will succeed in that, the next six days will tell.

In the afternoon, I wrapped up warm, joined a group from the Climate Justice campaign, and headed for the streets for the big demo. They estimated some 40,000 people were there, and it was completely friendly, positive, safe, feisty, etc and the police presence was minimal to non-existent (in comparison to previous Quebec policing at demos).

So with the temperature at -10 or so, we all strolled into separate gatherings that converged for the final rally, led by a skilled group of drummers; then we tried to keep warm while listening to the short and powerful speeches about how we needed to stop the world from getting warmer. If you tried to organize a big street demo in Victoria with the temperature this low, you might get 3 people out! And here there were 40,000. It was really heroic. Nothing is going to stop Montrealers from expressing their opinions!

After three hours, I really had to go inside to get warm, so I slipped into the big Guy Favreau complex, just north of the Palais, where there is a huge exhibit called "A World of Solutions" happening. Booths from everyone, everywhere. My most intriguing meeting was with the booth for the new hydrogen "ad-on" car, which is a regular car, to which these folks have added a small hydrogen system you can as it were "plug in". You fill it with water, and it is charged with electricity from the car's alternator to create hydrogen, which is fed directly into the injection chamber. The result is that the car uses 10 to 20% less fuel, and therefore produces 10-20% fewer greenhouse gases. The company is called Innovative Hydrogen Solutions, their website is www.IHSresearch.com, and they call the technology H2N-GEN. I've had it cross my desk before, but never seen it, or properly registered what it was. So I told them "you've really got to give this a better name!" They all agreed, and I said, "You should call it the Hydrogen Enhanced Vehicle (HEV)." They loved that, but overnight, I've decided it should be called the Hydrogen Enhanced Gasoline Vehicle (HEGV), so I'll go back on Monday and see if I can get them to adopt that.

I also met with the people at the Chicago Climate Exchange, and came away very favorably impressed. Since the US has not joined Kyoto, they are locked out of any global emissions trading, but they have persuaded a good number of companies to reduce their emissions by 1% a year between 1998 and 2003, and to trade their emissions among each other if some companies have been unable to meet that target, while others have done more. So they are getting good traction.

Last night, there was THE PARTY: a regular COP-11 tradition. It was in smoky club (no no-smoking bylaws here, alas!!!), and the music was modern techno-electric, which is not my personal favorite, but there was a wild atmosphere, and everyone was enjoying themselves, with acrobats, and a great band too. Then it was out into the cold to walk back to my hotel!

I'm off now to a big Inter-Religious Celebration, called Call of the Earth - Un Cri de la Terre; so more on this later!

Best wishes,
Guy