COPENHAGEN, DENMARK - Fifty young Americans took over a climate denier conference hosted by a prominent conservative organization this evening in Copenhagen, rushing the stage and telling the live TV audience that a clean energy future is the real road to prosperity in America. The young people, merely a fraction of the more than 350 US youth in Denmark for the UN climate negotiations, entered a session of the Americans for Prosperity "Hot Air Tour" speakers series and were able to drop two banners and gain access to the conference's stage. The live event was webcast to over forty climate denier rallies in cities across the United States. Here's the video.

The students entered the event in small groups, joining a paltry audience of five conference attendees, who had come to hear climate denier Lord Christopher Monckton speak about the Copenhagen climate negotiations. After the first five minutes of the event, student representatives from SustainUS, the Sierra Student Coalition, the Cascade Climate Network, and other American youth NGOs displayed banners reading "Climate Disaster Ahead" and "Clean Energy Now." After security agents at the event took the banners, the young attendees began a chant of "Real Americans for Prosperity are Americans for Clean Energy." The chant lasted five minutes, as the youth took the stage and displayed their message for the live video feed being sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, despite evasive action by Americans for Prosperity President Tim Phillips and his camera crew. As they left the stage, Lord Monckton repeatedly called the activists "crazed Hitler Youth" and "nazis."

"Clean energy creates jobs," says Rachel Barge, a 24-year-old entrepreneur from San Francisco, CA who was the first young person to raise her voice at the event, "These climate action delayers and science deniers are stealing bold, new economic opportunities from the American public." Laura Comer, 21, of Strongsville, OH, seconded Barge, saying, "We're representing the majority of Americans on this, particularly young Americans. The real America wants clean energy - not more fossil fuel-funded lies about the science."

"We are Americans for prosperity too," says Ethan Buckner of the Sierra Student Coalition, "Prosperity that's created through a new clean energy economy that will revitalize the American economy and provide millions of clean energy jobs for our generation and all generations to come." "We need a strong climate and clean energy bill from Congress and a science-based and just treaty in Copenhagen in order to jump start this new energy economy Americans are calling for so loudly," adds Ben Wessel of SustainUS, "The youth of America are ready to move forward into a sustainable future, and we need our elected officials to join us. We refuse to sit quietly today while our leaders decide the future of tomorrow." --Jamie Racine

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Original post appears in Canadian Geographiconline.

Copenhagen-- A giant orb glows in a major city square, while in another part of Copenhagen new steel cages await unruly protestors -- all signs that the United Nations climate negotiations are underway in Denmark's capital.

On Sunday, I sat down with Amber Church, the national director for the Canadian Youth Climate coalition, to get her take on the Canadian negotiating team for the next two weeks.

The 28-year-old called Canada a "lost lemming" in the global climate negotiations, even falling behind the U.S. with its inaction.

"Right now Canada is not leading -- it's not even following very well because Environment Minister Jim Prentice's line is, We can't do anything until the U.S. does something," Church said. "To be perfectly honest, the U.S. is ahead of us and we're not even following very well."

Her advice for Canada in Copenhagen? "Canada should lead, follow or get out of the way," Church said.

Church, who lives in Whitehorse, will be leading the Canadian youth delegation at the talks. The delegation is composed of a 35 activists from around the country, making up one of the largest youth delegations at the conference. This doesn't account for another 50 or so more Canadians who are attending with student delegations from universities, such as the University of Toronto.

Church said the Canadian youth will lobby hard for strong reduction targets, holding the Conservative government's negotiating team accountable for not supporting a climate bill earlier this year in the House of Commons, which called for certain emissions reductions.

"The Canadian public along with the House of Commons supports these targets and so we'd like to make sure our government is actually speaking for our people."

With this goal in mind, Canadian youth will be meeting with a growing list of Canadian politicians while in Copenhagen, including Prentice, NDP leader Jack Layton, Green Party leader Elizabeth May, environment ministers from the territories, and Canada's chief negotiator, Michael Martin.

A meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper is still in the works.

Church said these lobbying sessions with politicians will not be soft photo-ops, since the Canadian youth will be driving home their message, Church says.

"Canada needs to stop being obstructionist and Canada needs to come to the table and actually start participating," Church said.

Check back soon for more developments on the Canadian youth delegation in Copenhagen.

Liana B. Baker is the climate policy correspondent for Canadian Geographic in Copenhagen.

Follow Expedition Copenhagen on Twitter: www.twitter.com/willsteger

Davis has two TED talks up on the web site. The second is about belief and ritual. You can find it here.

In his speeches, Wade expounds on what unites us.

“We all share the same adaptive imperatives—we’re all born, we all bring our children into the world, we go through initiation rites, we have to deal with the inexorable separation of death. So it shouldn’t surprise us that we all sing, we all dance, we all have art. But what’s interesting is the unique cadence of the song, the rhythm of the dance in every culture.”

There are some light-hearted moments too, especially when Davis recounts ingesting shamanistic drugs

“To have that powder blown up your nose is rather like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with baroque paintings and landing in a sea of electricity,” he quips.

The Canadian-born Davis is an encyclopedia of indigenous cultures and how we’re losing them. While the losses are incalculable, especially the loss of language, Davis is never a downer.

“All of these people teach us that there are other ways of being, other ways of thinking, other ways of orienting yourself in the earth. This is an idea that if you think about can only fill you with hope,” he says.

Davis reflects on the ethnosphere, a term he coined “the sum total of all thoughts, dreams, ideals, myths, intuitions, and inspirations brought into being by the imagination since the dawn of consciousness.”

As if this wasn't already Davis' year, he will also deliver the Massey lectures, the prestigious week-long series of talks across Canada this fall.

One can only hope that on his Halloween tour date in Toronto, Davis will touch on the topic of his book The Serpent and the Rainbow -— the hunt for zombies.

Image: This photo was taken in August 2006 on the island of Kitava, in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea during a traditional dance celebration.
Credit: Wade Davis

Sometimes nature is responsible for the best special effects.

When a meteor entered the earth’s atmosphere over Saskatchewan last November, more than 100,000 people in Western Canada saw a light show in the night sky that trailed the fireball as it fell to earth.

In the video above, a police dashboard camera caught the whole thing on tape.

Although, no one found the shattered pieces until University of Calgary Grad student Ellen Milley spotted some black lumps on an ice-covered pond.

In Canadian Geographic’s October issue cartographer Steven Fick charts the space rock’s fiery end.

Scientists hadn't detected this meteor in space, or predicted it would hit the earth. But last year in Sudan some scientists did just that.

Magazines like Sky & Telescope and Wired covered the story.

This meteor fell and exploded just like the Canadian one, although it lit up the “predawn darkness over northern Sudan, creating sonic booms, and frightening thousands there and in southern Egypt as they headed home after morning prayers.”

The American scientist who spotted it, astronomer Timothy Spahr, along with a meteor specialist in California, Peter Jenniskens, rounded up students from the University of Khartoum in Sudan and sent them on a mission to locate the debris in the Nubian desert.

The search team succeeded after four days of looking. The black rocks showed up against the desert sand, just as the Canadian space rocks contrasted against the icy ponds of Saskatchewan—a perfect union of astronomy and geography.

At the U.N. climate talks, droves of delegates in suits walk beside young activists in T-shirts, but there’s only one person in the building with a pair of skis strapped to her back.

That’s Alison Gannett, an extreme skier who holds World Cup Free-skiing titles and starring roles in Warren Miller films of the '90s. For the past decade, however, she's been a climate change activist in the U.S.

"I really felt that for some reason, people weren’t connecting to climate change," Gannett says. "It was too far away, too esoteric, too intangible."

So to make the problem more concrete, two years ago, she started the Save Our Snow foundation, which is why she’s attached that message on a glossy paper to her backpack in Copenhagen. It’s a message that many people, especially Canadians, can relate to.

Her get-up has been a conversation starter with everyone from the president of Costa Rica to the first president of the UNFCC, who both tapped her on the shoulder when they saw her skis.

But the "save our snow" message goes beyond sport, Gannett says, since more than 50 percent of the world’s drinking water comes from snow.

Like many skiers, Gannett has spent a lot of time in Canada. Her favorite spot is Rossland, B.C., the home of Red Mountain. She also raves about Whistler (check out CG's Travel article from November), but not because of the powder.

"Whistler as a ski area has done amazing things to calculate their carbon emissions, reduce and offset them and produce clean power," she says.

Gannett is also a fan of B.C.’s carbon tax, a system that the province introduced in 2008 to make companies pay for their emissions. The tax doesn't create revenue for the province and is given back to taxpayers.

If sirens are going off just thinking about the carbon impact of Gannett’s travels — consider this. She lumps together speaking engagements geographically, and often has to break the news to organizations that she might only be able to come speak in two years. On the way to Denmark, she walked from London to Belgium, which took 15 days, before hopping on the climate express train to Copenhagen.

But if walking across countries isn't your thing, Gannett has other suggestions for cutting back consumption. Her web site lists some easy ways to be sustainable.

"A lot of people say 'oh we have to climb into a cave' to make these reductions, but I show examples of how to reduce your carbon footprint and still retain a very high quality of life," Gannett says.
Check back soon for more reports from Copenhagen.

Liana B. Baker, a former intern with the magazine, is a Canadian Geographic climate policy correspondent in Copenhagen. Photo by Liana B. Baker.

Polar explorer Will Steger is famous for his world record traverses of the North and South Poles. Right now I’m in Copenhagen with his foundation, a non-profit based in Minnesota that promotes climate change education.

Over the past week, I’ve had a chance to spend time with Steger and hear his eyewitness account of drastic changes in the Arctic. He has crossed shelves of sea ice in Antarctica that no longer exist.

Recent expeditions in Canada brought him to Ellesmere Island in 2008 and to Baffin Island in 2007. On the Baffin expedition, he was joined by billionaire Richard Branson and three Inuit hunters.

Steger has recorded a special message for Canadian Geographic readers, which starts at 3:18 in the video above. The beginning and end of the clip give background on his Arctic expeditions.

Canadian Geographic’s International Polar Year issue comes out in January. Consider this a preview of the topics it will tackle.

Will Steger:

Hello Canadian Geographic. I’m Will Steger and Happy International Polar Year.

I’ve traveled in the Canadian Arctic for over 45 years. I’ve traveled over tens of thousands of miles by dogsled and here in Copenhagen there is a lot at stake for the Canadian Arctic.

What’s at stake is your sea ice and your glaciers. It’s very serious that we reduce our carbon levels very quickly and the carbon levels are going to be determined here in Copenhagen, so Canada has a lot at stake here along with the rest of the world, but especially your native Dene and Inuit population. That’s what it’s all about here in Copenhagen.

Check back soon for more reports from Copenhagen.

Liana B. Baker, a former intern with the magazine, is a Canadian Geographic climate policy correspondent in Copenhagen

The Toronto Star "Summit Insider" blog reports that U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu snubbed Canada's Environment Minister Jim Prentice out of a photo op on Monday at the Copenhagen climate talks.

On Monday, Toby Heaps, a Canadian magazine editor, was handed a Canadian delegation press release about a photo-op with the two officials occuring outside a briefing room. When Heaps showed up, he saw Prentice's chief of staff arguing with Chu's entourage about the photo-op.
"The problem was the U.S. delegation hadn't given the green light for a photo-op, just for closed bilateral meeting between the two," Heaps writes.

More from Heaps:

Over the course of 10 minutes, Kelly repeatedly asked the U.S. delegation official to reconsider, to which the U.S. delegation official replied, negative. When Kelly asked for this to be taken up the chain of command, the U.S. delegation official replied "it came from pretty high up. It's not going to happen."

 

The U.S. official said he didn't understand why the photograph was so important, to which Kelly replied "we were carpetbagged this morning by (environmental non-governmental organizations) with a false press release, I gotta change the story."

The carpetbagging Heaps refers to is the stunt by the Yes Men, a notorious group of pranksters, who created a mirror image of a Wall Street Journal blog and falsely reported the Canadian delegation had suddenly changed its emissions targets and strategy at the talks. (Andy Bichlbaum of The Yes Men told HuffPo Green Editor Katherine Goldstein "I think Stephen Harper is so mad that he will personally sue us. And yes, so will the Wall Street Journal.")

Heaps says eventually another U.S. official came by with a compromise: The photo could be taken, but it could not be used for promotional purposes.

I verified the story with Liberal MP David McGuinty who confirmed that indeed the "the minister's chief of staff got into a very heated exchange with Steven Chu's officials yesterday," and that the Canadian delegation has been "positively despondent" ever since.

Keep in mind, McGuinty is not an official member of the Canadian delegation as a elected member of the Liberal party, the official opposition to the Conservative Party that heads the Canadian negotiating team.

Members of the Canadian youth delegation I spoke with said that Canadian circles have been a-buzz with rumors about the snub. "Basically Prentice showed up to speak to Chu and the Canadians said "now for the photo-op!" and the staff said 'whoa whoa whoa, we didn't talk about this,' Thea Witman, a Canadian youth leader says.

But what's bad for Prentice's P.R. has been a boon to the Canadian youth delegation. "Even the Americans don't want to be associated with Canada," Witman says. "We're trying to capitalize it and further push action at home and sway public opinion."

Check back soon for more reports from Copenhagen.

Liana B. Baker, a former intern with the magazine, is a Canadian Geographic climate policy correspondent in Copenhagen

Protests rocked Copenhagen this week, but I’ll leave them to the mainstream media and instead focus on acting locally.

Many municipal mayors are showing up in Copenhagen. At first I thought they were just jumping on the bandwagon, but I soon discovered they're taking part in a parallel summit organized by local and regional governments from around the world.

Cities are immensely important to reducing carbon emissions, and I spoke with Hugh Bartling, a public policy professor at Depaul University in Chicago, who explained just what kind of impact they have.

"Fifty percent of the world’s population are in cities, and by 2050, it’ll be 80 percent," Bartling says. "If you think about it, most of the actual policy implementation happens at local levels in a lot of places, both in the industrialized world and the developing world."

That means that if world leaders ever strike a climate treaty to curb greenhouse gas emissions, it will be cities ensuring the carbon reductions are made and footing the bill to boot.

That's why city representatives are here (NYC’s Bloomberg arrived on Tuesday) making sure that their views are heard. But they have their work cut out for them. "It’s heads of state that negotiate treaties, not mayors," Bartling says.

"What local officials really want to see is something in the text that acknowledges local authorities and government," he says. "That means whatever deal is hashed out, in the developing world and elsewhere, mayors can go to their national government and say, 'we need to have aid money coming into the cities.'"

Cities also have control over buildings, which account for 48 percent of all the energy used in the United States — one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters. Cities could slash these by changing zoning codes and ordinances, Bartling says.

A recent Finnish study shows that 95 percent of the world’s buildings that will exist in 2050 have already been built. Cities wield the power to put measures in place to save energy in these aging buildings, such as insisting on better insulation, for example.

Bartling says he will have his eye on how suburbs will adapt to reducing emissions under a global climate treaty. He has studied how sprawl developed in the U.S. and Canada, written a book about it and was even called on by the Canadian government to work on how to transform suburbs in Toronto.

"In Canada and the U.S., most of the population growth happened after World War II and there was no real concern with climate change," he says. "The assumption was limitless amounts of fossil fuels."

Bartling can distill the toils of suburban life into a sentence: "You work here, you shop there, you live here and we all crash and there's huge congestion and it screws up air quality."

He has also studied sewage and said it's one of his favorite topics, but I declined to follow up.

Check back soon for more reports from Copenhagen.

Liana B. Baker, a former intern with the magazine, is a Canadian Geographic climate policy correspondent in Copenhagen.

With hopes fading that countries will reach an international climate treaty in Copenhagen, it comes as some consolation that progress has been made to preserve the world’s forests.

On Wednesday, six of the world’s richest countries including the U.S., Australia and Japan announced they would pledge $3.5 billion to halt deforestation in developing countries.

Announcements like this don’t come out of thin air. They're the result of countless hours spent by teams of researchers from both developed and developing countries who are crunching numbers and designing economic models.

Montrealer Jordan Isenberg, 23, is one of those researchers. While he isn’t Guatemalan, Isenberg is in Copenhagen as technical adviser to Guatemala's delegation. He’s one of many citizens from richer countries joining smaller delegations to level the playing field at the negotiating table.

"Countries like Guatemala, for example, don’t have the same resources at home that a developed country might have," he says.

Isenberg’s research comes into play at the negotiating table. A U.S. representative, for example, might declare that emissions should to be reduced by 20 percent in developing countries. A developing country like Guatemala will then respond by requesting funding to help meet that target. But who decides how much the country should request and which figures should be included in the treaty?

Isenberg is on the team working behind the scenes in to coming up with these specific numbers, which will then become Guatemala’s position.

When he’s not doing research, Isenberg is secretary to the chief negotiator of Guatemala. In that role, he attends meetings with other countries, types up notes and does key translation work.

"Language is a big issue and smaller countries are at a disadvantage," Isenberg says. "The nuances in the text can get totally lost."

While many young Canadian and students are in Copenhagen, not many are in Isenberg’s position, directly influencing the text of a treaty. His road to Copenhagen started in 2007 when he studied in Panama under Catherine Potvin, a biology professor at McGill University. In Panama, Isenberg interned at the government’s climate change office where he put together a report on how feasible it is to pay landless rural poor to stop cutting down forests for their income. Under Potvin, he helped developed a new finance scheme to prevent deforestation that has since become the norm in the international arena.

"I’m here to help push forward Guatemala’s interest, but those interests are aligned with social justice, climate justice, human rights and quality of life," Isenberg says. "Those are issues I can get behind."

Photo: Jordan Isenberg, above, from Montreal, is representing Guatemala at the U.N. climate talks

Check back soon for more reports from Copenhagen.

Liana B. Baker, a former intern with the magazine, is a Canadian Geographic climate policy correspondent in Copenhagen

New steel cages await unruly protesters in one part of Copenhagen, while in one of the city's main squares a giant orb, symbolizing the earth, glows. Denmark’s capital is primed for today’s kickoff of 12 days of United Nations climate negotiations.

Where does Canada stand?

On Sunday, I sat down with Amber Church, the national director for the Canadian Youth Climate coalition, to get her take on our nation's negotiating team.

The 28-year-old calls Canada a "lost lemming" in the global climate negotiations, which has fallen behind the U.S. in its inaction.

"Right now Canada is not leading — it’s not even following very well because Environment Minister Jim Prentice’s line is 'We can't do anything until the U.S. does something,'" Church says.

Her advice for Canada in Copenhagen: "Canada should lead, follow or get out of the way!"

Church, who lives in Whitehorse, is heading Canada's youth delegation at the talks. Made up of 35 activists from around the country, the delegation is one of the largest youth groups at the conference, not counting another 50 or so young Canadians attending with delegations from universities such as U of T.

Church says her team will lobby hard for strong reduction targets, holding the Conservative government’s negotiating team accountable for not supporting a climate bill, which called for specific emissions targets, in the House of Commons earlier this year.

"The Canadian public along with the House of Commons supports these goals and so we’d like to make sure our government is actually speaking for our people," Church says.

With this in mind, Canadian youth will be meeting with a growing list of our country's politicians while in Copenhagen, including Jim Prentice, NDP leader Jack Layton, Green Party leader Elizabeth May, environment ministers from the territories, and Canada’s chief negotiator, Michael Martin.

A meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper is still in the works.

Church says these lobbying sessions will not be soft photo-ops, since her group will be driving home their message. "Canada needs to stop being obstructionist and to come to the table and actually start participating."

Check back soon for more reports from Copenhagen.

Liana B. Baker, a former intern with the magazine, is a Canadian Geographic climate policy correspondent in Copenhagen.

Photos: Liana B. Baker