Interesting fact #1: The United States is the only developed nation never to have ratified the Kyoto treaty.

Young people from throughout the world will be convening to make the case for climate justice and show the faces of the people who will be affected the most: our generation. I will join these climate activists and provide support to their efforts.

Interesting fact #2: The United States has one of the highest per-capita emissions in the world, especially when you exclude small petroleum exporting countries.

In Copenhagen I will bring the energy, enthusiasm, and ideas of the Campus Progress Network, I will be blogging on Funding Our Future to let you all know about how progress is looking on the ground, and I will be working with fellows from the Center for American Progress to try to influence the direction of the negotiations.

If you have any ideas, thoughts, or questions about the trip, please leave a comment. I will be convening a conference call for Campus Progress Network members as we get closer to my departure, hope to see you all there!

* Not in the Campus Progress Network? Join here!

Watch our own Tony Anderson at the UN Climate Summit Youth Press Conference.

This New York Times article outlines several UN aid workers' concerns that the crisis in Somalia is being forgotten because it's not as popular as the crisis in Darfur.

"Unlike Darfur, where the suffering is being eased by a billion-dollar aid operation and more than 10,000 aid workers, Somalia is still considered mostly a no-go zone. Just last week, a Somali aid worker and a guard were shot to death at an aid distribution center in Afgooye. United Nations officials estimate that total emergency aid is under $200 million, partly because it is so difficult just getting food into the country." 

Yesterday, 49 Greenpeace activists were arrested during a protest outside President Bush’s climate conference at the State Department. After blowing off the UN summit on climate change earlier this week, Bush gathered representatives from major polluting countries in efforts to reverse his awful environmental image.

The Washington Post noted that Bush

assured the rest of the world today that he takes climate change seriously and vowed that the United States "will do its part" in crafting "a new international approach" to reduce the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. However, he proposed no new initiatives to do so.

Fortunately, Greenpeace activists called Bush on his bullshit. Greenpeace’s US executive director John Passacantando told the crowd outside the State Department that “These delegates are hearing us…The American people are going to hear us, because we know this meeting by President Bush is a fraud.” 49 of about 70 protestors, including John, were charged with unlawful assembly after ignoring officers' orders to stop the protest.

John is in our offices today—he spoke to our Advisory Board this afternoon, describing Greenpeace’s current initiatives and fielding tough questions from our students. For more on how you can get involved in climate change on your campus, check out the Campus Climate Challenge.

Mark has a good wrap up on what happened yesterday over at UN Dispatch (despite the fact that the Koyoto Treaty actually expires in 2012 and not 2015). What Mark says is that while yesterday's meetings were impotant because they lay the groundwrork for the "largely technical" meeting in Bali, but, "The elephant in the room, of course, is that for the Bali negotiations to be successful, the Kyoto non-signatories (namely the United States, China and India) need to be on board."

What I found intereesting was the limbo of a country like India. India is still largely poor, but has found industrialization success at higher levels. Getting India on board with stopping climate change is one of the keys, but as long as both the United States and China remain uncommitted, they'll never give up their place in the group of booming economies, even if they understand it puts every in a worse position environmentally. India has also been important on the world scene for a fairly short time. So in short, it takes leadership from the highest levels of the United Sates government from a president that isn't an oil man. 

Al Gore is now speaking at the UN. His speech sounds a lot like his movie/powerpoint in the beginning when he talks of disappearing lakes and species. Later he gets more perscriptive. Some highlights:

• He advocates linking poverty reduction and carbon emission reduction.
• Spending less time on covering OJ Simpson and Paris Hilton (to applause).
• Get emissions under control by 2010, two years earlier than currently proposed.
• Call an emergency session in early '08 to follow up the Bali summit. 

UN press people insist that Americans just aren't thinking about the dire situation. A combination of flooding, changes in rainfall patterns, and melting glaciers, among others are going to cause huge problems in less time than we'd like to admit.

Meanwhile, I think Matt has it about right here:

[T]here's a need for a successor treaty to Kyoto to govern the world after 2012. The thinking is that it takes two years to negotiate a treaty, and then two years to get it ratified. Thus, we need to start next year at a scheduled meeting in Bali, Indonesia. But if the world's governments sit down in Bali next year cold after years of inactivity, then nothing's going to happen. So there's a kind of kabuki meeting happening this year to get things rolling. Since nothing's going to happen, Bush is willing to participate -- Condi Rice will be at the formal meeting, and Bush himself at an informal one with other heads of government this evening -- but that itself signifies that the process is getting rolling again. The idea, then, is that the next administration will be able to hit the ground running, stepping into a process that's already under way.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon prompted climate change with a sense of urgency saying what we don't have is time. Later, youth representatives from the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition said that they represent a contingent of youth that will begin to vote on the issue of climate change.

Report after report from the IPCC has told us that there is a small windown in which global emissions need to peak if we were to avoid dangerous climate change. the citizens of the world now realize the potential magnitude of the problem and they will no longer tolerate elected leaders that do not act accordingly. I turned 18 this year and am now among the many that will vote for the climate.

This is an interesting perspective. If youth banded together and became a contingent of voters who actually held elected officials accountable for their position on cimate change, that would be hugely beneficial to the poltical spectrum. Young people, after all, are the ones that are increasingly going to be paying the price.

I'm in New York City this week to attend a UN meeting tomorrow where various heads of state are gathering to begin the dialog on climate change. This meeting is presumably the groundwork for a summit scheduled for December in Bali, Indonesia. Among those heads of state that will be absent tomorrow are the United States (although Bush is scheduled to appear later in the day), China (due to elections there), and India.

It appears that while it's definitely progress to have a lot of heads of state get together to talk about climate change, there seems to be a lack of, ahem, leadership among the most industrialized nations. Many young college students out there care deeply about climate change. They're willing to bring their own tote bags to the grocery store to save on plastic; they're willing to lobby their universities to build according to LEED standards; they'll even give up driving a car in favor of more environmentally friendly modes of transportation. But it seems obvious that unless heads of state around the world are willing to make hard policy decisions about industry, all that personal greening will be for naught.

It's unclear what will come out of the summit meeting tomorrow. I'll be blogging from there. I was told a "youth representative" will be at the opening planery. More to come on the blog.

With the announcement that the Sudanese government under President Omar al-Bashir is close to reopening negotiations with rebel groups in Darfur, promising a ceasefire in the meantime, the Sudanese people along with the rest of the world may finally see and end to the violence in sight. But we must not get our hopes up quite yet. Several attempts at peace including an actual ceasefire have all lagged and eventually broken down completely over the last three years as genocide has continued in Sudan. As the report details the upcoming negations in Libya, it is hard to believe that this time around any agreement will stick as the government has yet to acknowledge their support of the Janjaweed militias who carry out the genocide. Bashir’s rhetoric about bringing an end to the nearly decade long conflict have amounted to nothing but hollow promises. His Islamic government has financed and supplied the Janjaweed militias for several years in their attempts to destroy all existence of the non-Arab African population in the western Darfur region. As the African Union remains largely ineffective in containing the violence, constrained by weak mandates and poor logistical support, the UN now stands to beef up its police force in the Darfur region.

Apparently eating meat is worse for the environment than driving a Hummer--at least according to a UN Food and Agriculture Organization report.

Specifically, the report finds that "the livestock business generates more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined."

PETA and other animal rights groups are rallying around this finding, taking the opportunity to sell people on animal-friendly lifestyles without calling them murderers or getting blood on them (disclosure: I'm a vegetarian, but for largely apolitical reasons).

I'm skeptical that this approach will have much success. Asking Americans to give up SUVs and turn their lights off is one thing--ditching the cheeseburger should be easier, but I bet it won't fly.