World leaders continue to arrive for the United Nations conference on climate change in Copenhagen amid continuing uncertainty about the possibility of a deal, and increasingly hostile stand-offs between police and protesters outside the conference centre with tear gas being fired.
With over 115 world leaders and heads of state attending the conference, there are still large gaps in the texts that have been distributed to the parties, suggesting that a deal is not close.
British prime minister Gordon Brown arrived yesterday to try and give impetus to the talks but progress has been slow. US President Barack Obama is due to arrive later this week. The Taoiseach Brian Cowen will arrive here tomorrow night, to join the Minister for the Environment John Gormley who has been here since the weekend.
The Danish prime minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, this morning took over the chair as president of the COP from his environment minister Connie Hedegaard, which was taken as another sign of urgency from the Danish presidency.
Inside the cavernous convention hall, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, among the first leaders to address the assembly, echoed the protesters' sentiments: "If the climate was a bank, a capitalist bank, they would have saved it."
Earlier, behind closed doors, negotiators dealing with core issues debated until just before dawn without setting new goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions or for financing poorer countries' efforts to cope with coming climate change, key elements of any deal.
Meanwhile, the fraught atmosphere inside and outside the conference centre in the city heightened this morning with a series of walk-outs, sit-down protests and a march on the centre by environmental and climate change campaigners who have been excluded from the negotiations.
Police used teargas to disperse protesters outside the conference centre and 100 arrests were reportedly made. Several hundred climate change campaigners, denied access to the centre, marched from the city centre to the conference location in the suburbs.
At the plenary session this morning, delegates from industrial countries and developing countries – particularly the Group of 77 countries and China – wrangled over texts related to financing and to the second period of the Kyoto Protocol which is due to commence from 2013.
Richer countries want any deal that emerges from the conference to replace the Kyoto Protocol, while developing countries have argued for it to be retained as it is the only legally binding agreement. The Danish presidency of the talks is due to present a new text at lunchtime but already South Africa, Sudan, India, China and Bolivia have signalled their objections during the session.
Nafie Ali Nafie of Sudan, speaking on behalf of the G77 plus China group, said that it would not accept any agreement that made the second period of Kyoto redundant.
“We feel there is lack of transparency in the way that decisions are made and the identification of issues to be discussed left a lot to be desired,” he said.
Friends of the Earth held a sit-down protest in the lobby of the centre after the entire delegation was denied entry. UN officials cited over-crowding as the reason after 45,000 delegates have registered to attend a conference centre that can only accommodate 15,000.
Molly Walsh of Friends of the Earth Ireland (FOE) who took part in the protest, said that the organisation was a grass-roots one with a presence in 77 countries with a very string track record.
She said that FOE had been “locked out and that suits all those who have been making locked-room deals all week.” A little later, hundreds of members of other climate change campaign groups staged a public walking out from the centre, in protest at the nature and direction of the talks.
“We are disgusted,” said Kevin Smith of Climate Justice Action, as he took part in the walk-out. “The targets are totally out of line with what is needed.”
Fr John Leydon, a Columban missionary based in the Philippines, was another of those who walked out. He said that the talks for him had been an expression of the dysfunctional political system.
“What you have had is the financial people who sold us out with a whole lot of crap,” he said.
“They have taken over the process and changed it into carbon trading. Politicians are responding to corporate concerns. People are motivated by greed,” he added.
Fr Leydon, a native of Dunmore, Co Galway, helps run a number of environmental NGOs in Manila included an organisation called Cell and another called the Great Work Movement.