2 Dec 2015
Rob reports from COP21 in Paris: Day Five
This shouldn’t take so long as today was, compared to past days, relatively uneventful. Its first half was dominated by the Transition Network website going down, leading to lots of scrabbling around and my being unable to upload various things that I needed to upload. I got to Le Bourget at about 11, and found a corner where, once the website was back up again, I got various things up onto the site. I also sat and wrote a letter to my MP, asking her to vote against bombing Syria (although she clearly will), the last paragraph of which was:
“You said on Twitter that you believe that this intervention will mean that in 5 years, Syria will be more peaceful, and that the risk of terrorism will have been reduced for the UK. I think, with the greatest of respect, that that is utterly delusional. There is no evidence to support that, quite the opposite. I urge you, knowing what a great constituency MP you are, how skilled you are at bringing people together, and that your deep values are those of kindness, reason and a seeking of common ground, to be the one that initiates the breaking of this cycle of endless retribution”.
I also thought that you might like to know what it is actually like inside Le Bourget, made this very short little video impression to just give you a taste of it:
At about 1, I went over to the Climate Generations area at COP21, the civil society zone, which is open to the general public to meet up with other Transitioners, have some food and a catch up.
At 4pm there was a second screening of ‘Demain‘ which was also very good on second viewing. This was followed by a Q&A/audience discussion. Here are a few stills from it to give you an impression:
After this, those of us who had appeared in Demain were ushered over to briefly meet with Ségolène Royal, Minister of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy, and a very well-known politician in France. We had a group photo taken, and I gave my camera to someone to take a photo, but sadly, when I got my camera back and the group had dispersed, I had been cut off the end of the picture. Here it is:
But that’s not really ok, because I was actually there, so here is a mocked up version of what you should actually be looking at here:
… or perhaps …
And that was my day really. A train back to town. A pizza with Henry and Filipa. And now back to blog for you with the best of intentions of having something vaguely approaching an early night. It may yet happen … or not. We’ll see. See you tomorrow.