A cap-and-trade exercise riles Copenhagen

A cap-and-trade exercise riles Copenhagen: "

Ironies abound here at the global climate talks, from the simple
(holding a global-warming summit in freezing cold, inviting thousands
of delegates from impoverished nations to one of the world’s most
expensive cities) to the sad (the Danish people, some of the nicest on
the planet, being represented on television by baton-wielding police
cracking down on protesters).

But
perhaps the most fascinating irony of all is playing out inside the
host Bella Center, where environmentalists and other nonprofit groups
are getting a quick and brutal immersion in the “cap-and-trade” system
that President Obama has proposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in
the United States.

The
problem here in Copenhagen is space: The Bella Center holds 20,000
people at capacity. The United Nations issued more than double that
many credentials for the climate summit. So as more and more people
arrived this week – delegates, environmentalists, Venezuelan President
Hugo Chavez – summit organizers started limiting who could come inside.

They
started by issuing “secondary passes” to nonprofits and requiring
those passes for admission. The groups, commonly referred to as non-governmental organizations or NGOs, are free to trade the passes
amongst themselves.

The
number of passes has declined each day. By some groups’ estimates, the
entire U.S. environmental movement – consisting of 90 groups and
thousands of people – will be down to fewer than 10 total passes by
Thursday.

If
that plan sounds familiar, it should. It’s a super-compressed version
of how Obama wants to reduce the emissions that scientists blame for global
warming: declining cap, tradeable permits, near phase-out in the long
term.

Not
that the parallel is any comfort to NGOs, who complained bitterly today
that their numbers would be reduced from 15,000 total last week to
1,000 total on Thursday.

Mary
Robinson, the honorary chair of Oxfam International, said in a statement
that her group “is extremely concerned about the limited access which
observers have to the international climate talks and the outright
exclusion of some organizations altogether. With the negotiations here
in crisis we desperately need the engagement and witness of people's
organizations to keep the pressure on political leaders to deliver a
fair, ambitious and binding climate deal.”

Conference
organizers said today they will open an overflow center offsite on
Thursday for the locked-out NGOs to watch proceedings. No word on
whether a secondary pass market has sprung up yet.

--Jim Tankersley in Copenhagen

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