The Story of Cap and Trade

First, a friendly warning for those who may find themselves in Copenhagen anytime after 7:00 PM (or 19:00 as our friends the Danes would say) on a Monday night looking for a place to make 400 photocopies: Your task will not be an easy one. After a dozen or so friendly Danes expressed a seeming dumbfoundedness or incredulity at the notion of wishing to make 400 photocopies, we found an all night Internet Cafe who, upon hearing our request, laughed and informed us that it'd be cheaper if we just bought a printer and did the printing ourselves. After some back-and-forth with the organization for who we were asked to print and given the desperation of our plight and a well-founded skepticism towards the availability of a late night printer retailer, we quickly found ourselves printing flyers (25 at a time so as not to overheat the machine) at 3 kroner a piece (I leave the math to the reader; did we mention that Copenhagen is the third most exensive city in the world?). Thanks to some extremely helpful internet cafe shopkeeps (a kindness worthy of a plug), we weren't required to cut the handbills by hand and were able to sit in on an Islands First meeting we'd been kindly invited too earlier in the day in a timely fashion (Steve: Naomi Klein had drinks at the table next to us but I had to restrain myself: Not now nerd-crush, there's climate change afoot!).

So, what this has to do with the Story of Cap and Trade. The mantra of our trip has been to be as useful as possible, with this in mind, we have actively advertised ourselves as two overly enthusiastic foot-soldiers available to productive endeavours in need. So last night we were contacted by a representative of Climate Justice Now! who was in dire needs of publicity for a screening that was to take place the following day, and enlisted us to do some flyering. As you may have guessed, this film was the Story of Cap and Trade and it had its Europeean premiere tonight (unless you count Youtube as a premiere). I'll embed the film here for anyone curious enough to wish to view it (It's under 10 minutes).



In addition to meeting with the people with Islands First (a facinating experience that provided great insight into how negotiation teams coordinate amongst themselves, as well as with other groups), we had our first morning volunteering with KlimaForum today, which gave us the opportunity to meet many people - there is always more to tell, but as it is just a few short hours until we are back at it in the morning, so unfortunately, that's all for now.

Keep the Hopenhagen,
Steve & Sarah