Still no sign of a binding agreement

There is no snow in Copenhagen, and that is strange for winter in Denmark. The World Wildlife Fund's Panasonic-sponsored "Ice Bear" is melting rapidly in the Nytorv Square in downtown Copenhagen. Meanwhile, little headway is being made at the COP15 conference talks.

Energy companies are seeking to outdo each other in boasting about how "green" they are around the Danish capital. The "Hopenhagen" campaign on the Metro and buses is sponsored by Siemens. Vattenfall and Renault are also prevalent. Coca-Cola has "A Bottle of Hope" add in the city for its sustainability campaign. McDonald's restaurants are filled with leaves, and there are plans to turn the company's red trademark green in hundreds of fast-food joints, starting in Germany in 2010.

It is generally recognised that the first week of the COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference was spent refining national positions and addressing core issues in preparation for the arrival of 110 heads of state during the second week.

Lip service?

Their entrance onto the scene does not elicit much hope for an agreement to be signed. The pre-conference slogan "Seal the Deal" has largely been replaced by "Bend the Trend". Other slogans have also popped up, such as the "Will to Thrill … for a Change", popularised by a Danish health consultancy firm called Meng.

And there was no shortage of catchy phrases either at the demonstration organised by the Danish Workers' Union, which included global NGOs like Greenpeace that had made 3,000 banners reading: "Bla, Bla, Bla … Act Now!", "There is No Planet B", and "Planet Not Profit". Other banners read "Face Facts, Make Pacts". There was dancing (to keep warm perhaps) and chanting ("keep the oil in the soil") in the streets throughout the afternoon.

The demonstration walked from the Danish Parliament to the Bella Centre on Amager Island, where COP15 is being held. This is a good six kilometres south of the city. Copenhagen is a small European capital; almost a large provincial town. This will be no Seattle or Genoa. Nor will it incite the mass movement of people that the civil rights riots caused in the United States in the 1960s.

Climate change is simply too abstract for many people. Once the more drastic effects of global warming occur then more people will begin to respond. Let's see what the Dutch do when their dikes are overwhelmed or what the Italians do when Venice is submerged or the Belgians when the lowlands are flooded.

The 20,000 demonstrators in Copenhagen were accompanied by hundreds of police and greeted far outside the Bella Centre by anti-riot squads. Negotiators watched the demonstrators arrive on TV screens inside the Bella Centre, and that is the tremendous distance that separates the civil society groups from official representatives.

One such civil society initiative is the parallel alternative conference called KlimaForum09, which has attracted international activists such as Naomi Klein to speak at their launch. People from around the world have come to participate in panels. KlimaForum09 set up a voluntary housing system whereby willing Danish families would take in foreign participants during their time in Copenhagen.

Meanwhile, COP15 has already seen rich and poor countries at loggerheads. The rift between developed and developing countries has become more apparent than ever. A Danish text leaked early last week called for developed nations to be allowed to emit twice as much as emerging economies — this text was discarded. China then dismissed the EU pledge of 2.4 billion euros (Dh8.8 billion) as minimal compared to the survival costs of the small island countries.

The most prominent posturing is between the two leading global greenhouse gas emitters. The US wants to see China make larger cuts to its emissions and to send an international team to monitor the fulfilment of those cuts, while China has continued to remind the US and developed countries under Annex I of their historic responsibility to disburse more funds for economic development and to transfer technology for energy-efficient growth.

Technology transfer

According to COP15 President Connie Hedegaard, progress has been made on the transfer of "green" technology, and the 200 pages of the two pivotal documents, the Kyoto Protocol and the UN Climate Change Convention, have been condensed to seven pages to highlight the core issues. Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Yvo de Boer said people should not expect the US to join the Kyoto family, but encouraged both China and the US to raise collective ambitions.

As everyone awaits the arrival of Barack Obama on the last day of the conference, developing nations have been calling for a legally binding agreement to be signed, but without the US this would be largely symbolic. Both Hedegaard and de Boer said that a "set of decisions" was more likely to emerge, postponing a legally binding accord to 2010 or beyond. While we wait for world leaders to decide, this week it's supposed to snow.

Stuart Reigeluth is editor of Revolve Magazine.