Artwork at the Ibsens Hotel in Copenhagen used for money. (Photo: April Peavey)

Some paintings are done in watercolor or acrylic, while others are in pen and ink. A few look as if professional artists or art students created them, while others look as if my 8-year-old niece or 5-year-old nephew drew them.

But expertise or artistic flair doesn’t matter here. This art has purpose and value; it’s treated as cold, hard cash (and yes, it’s art).

This is Artmoney and it’s used as an alternative currency here at the hotel. Artists bring in their framed work and use it for full or partial payment towards a hotel room or meal. The art is then hung and sold to patrons, hotel guests and collectors of Artmoney.

Each artistic bank note is worth roughly 200 Danish Kr. or about $34 US. It holds the same value to every artist and every business.

Danish artist Lars Kraemmer thought up the idea of Artmoney late one night in Copenhagen, in December 1997. As he writes on his website, he had hit hard times and needed to make ends meet. He thought of “making money.” Money was the means; art was the end.

Once the idea stuck, Kraemmer then set to work on his currency art project. He cut paper into pieces that were slightly larger than a regular Danish Kroner (but smaller than a typical painting) and he then set out to barter with local businesses. A few years later Kraemmer went global with his international art project.

Today, over 1,000 artists from 42 countries create Artmoney. The Ibsens Hotel, here in Copenhagen, was the first hotel to accept Artmoney. Currently over 100 hotels, restaurants, and businesses do. And by one estimate, more than $80 million dollars have been issued.

Because Artmoney holds its value, it’s possible more businesses will accept this alternative form of payment and perhaps more artists will take part. And for those who are tired of currency fluctuations could see Artmoney as one commodity that will hold steady in these uncertain times.

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LISA MULLINS: Award-winning chef Rene Redzepi doesn’t cook with acai berries. But he does cook with cloudberries. Redzepi runs a restaurant called Noma in Copenhagen, Denmark. The house specialty there is reinventing Nordic Cuisine. And, yeah, Noma happens to be the Best Restaurant in the World. That’s according to the latest ranking by Restaurant Magazine in Britain. Chef Rene Redzepi joins us now from New York now. You have written a cookbook with recipes from your restaurant in Copenhagen. We do not want to mislead our listeners, though, Rene, this is not food that will be sitting in your fridge. It’s not made with ingredients that you might have hanging out, like burnt hay and puffin eggs and musk ox, et cetera. Who cooks that way besides you?

RENE REDZEPI:  That’s a good question. Not many do, which is actually I think why we are being recognized the way we are. Our book is as much as, let’s say an atlas, of Scandinavian, Nordic, modern cooking. It’s an inspiration that the people can use, especially chefs I would say. They can use that in a way so they can see how that ingredients from an area in the world that is not known for [SOUNDS LIKE] gastronomy. How ingredients can be transformed onto a plate…

MULLINS:  You know it would be good to have an example right now because there are so many amazing photographs in the cookbook and this is an enormous coffee table book as well, but I should say the images are not things like macaroni and cheese and other comfort foods. This is more like surrealist photography. I wonder if there is an example that you could give us of not only how you came about a particular set of ingredients acting well together, but also how you plated them because that’s a part of what you’re going for as well.

REDZEPI: Sure. I often here that it looks like a landscape or something taken straight from nature. This is simply because this is where we spend our time. This is our inspiration. We forage. We go to the shorelines. We go to the forest. I consider ourselves to have a pact with nature. We find an ingredient of extraordinary high quality, let’s say the blueberries, and what we did is we took this blueberry and we just looked around it and looked at what else grew there.

MULLINS: What did you find?

REDZEPI: Well, we find wild thyme, we found heather, and other herbs such as [INDISCERNIBLE] to put on the plate. And that became the dish. You know, heather, wild thyme and [INDISCERNIBLE], with of course blueberries as the lead guitarist of the dish.

MULLINS: Sounds like wild times. Did you, I mean is that going to make anybody feel full or is that not the point?

REDZEPI: For me, essentially there’s two types of restaurants. There’s the gas stations where you go to get full. And then there’s restaurants beyond that. They challenge you and they challenge your reference points on what food is.

MULLINS: You know when you say that you wish more people would eat this way, obviously we’re not all in Denmark, we don’t all have blueberries growing near us or have a shoreline close by. But is there one ingredient that you think more people could use?

REDZEPI: Well, you mentioned acai berry, and…

MULLINS:  You pronounce it acai, that’s very interesting, a-c-a-i, which a lot of people say acai, but you say acai.

REDZEPI: You know, I’m stuck up there in north, what do I know about these exotic berries? But there’s a berry called sea buckthorn, which I’ve even seen in Canada. I’m sure it’s around your area there in Boston. And that’s a berry of unique high qualities that I think should be present more.

MULLINS: In what? What would you do with it?

REDZEPI: In anything. That’s the beauty about this berry. Its high rich in C vitamin, quite acidic. This could be in a yogurt. You could juice it and serve it over your raw fish. They can be in your cereal as a dried berry in the mornings. It’s a universal berry that can be used just in any part of cuisine.

MULLINS: You called it a sea buck berry?

REDZEPI: Sea buckthorn.

MULLINS: Sea buckthorn?

REDZEPI: Yeah, some call it hawthorn as well.

MULLINS:  Oh, yes. I’ve heard of hawthorn. Well, there may be the first ever run in the United States or Canada on sea buckthorn thanks to you.

REDZEPI: Hopefully.

MULLINS: Alright. Rene, thank you very much. Very nice to talk to you.

REDZEPI: Nice talking to you. Thank you.

MULLINS: Rene Redzepi is the co-owner and chef of Noma in Copenhagen, Denmark. His new book about his cuisine is called Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine. If you’d like to check out some gorgeous photos of Rene’s dishes, go to our website at TheWorld.org. Good luck to you. Nice to talk to you again.

REDZEPI: You too.

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MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman, this is The World.  Scientists know of serious threats to frog species across the globe.  They’re vanishing from many areas, though the exact cause is in question.  It could be disease or habitat destruction.  Now a study published by the Journal of Science suggests the world’s lizards are in peril because of climate change.  The World’s Science Correspondent, Rhitu Chatterjee has the story.

RHITU CHATTERJEE:  The European common lizard is a slender creature with a brown back and brightly colored belly.  And as its name implies, it’s found across Europe.  In the 1980′s scientists had documented the lizards in many parts of the Pyrenees mountain range in France.  But when ecologist Barry Sinervo of UC Santa Cruz went back to those locations in the 1990′s, he was surprised by what he found.

BARRY SINERVO:  I was in fact shocked.  They were extinct at many locations.

CHATTERJEE: Sinervo couldn’t find an obvious reason why the lizards had vanished from these areas.  The lizards do still live in some parts of the Pyrenees and the sites where they went extinct were pristine; undisturbed by development.  But there was something different about the areas that had lost their lizards.

SINERVO: They were all concentrated in the southern part of the range and at low elevation.

CHATTERJEE: In other words, these were relatively warm areas at the edge of the species range.  Maybe these areas were getting too warm.  Sinervo wondered if these lizards were dying off due to global warming.

SINERVO: So I thought well that’s interesting but it’s not like a global pattern.

CHATTERJEE: Then in 2006 Sinervo went to Mexico.  And he found the same pattern of local extinctions.  Mountain dwelling lizards were disappearing from the warmer edges of their ranges.  But was it really the heat that was killing them off?  Biologist Donald Miles of Ohio University examined that question.  He measured the air temperature of the sites where the lizards had vanished.  And indeed, for part of the year, these places were too hot for the lizards to survive.

DONALD MILES:  The extinct sites were thermally inhospitable so we got the smoking gun.

CHATTERJEE: Miles, Sinervo and their team wondered what these findings meant for lizards worldwide.  They scoured the literature for data on other lizards.  They applied what they had learned in Mexico and combined it with projections of future temperature increases.  And from that they made some predictions.  If nothing is done to curb global warming, nearly a fifth of all lizard species may go extinct by 2080.  Raymond Huey is a herpetologist at the University of Washington.  He calls the new study solid and important.

RAYMOND HUEY:  This is the first major paper to show that extinctions of lizards are not just for the future, but they’re here now.  I don’t think anyone had an appreciation of that on a global scale.

CHATTERJEE: And scientists say that it’s not just the lizards that are in trouble.  The problem is many species live in mountain ranges.  And as the temperature warms, these animals will have to move higher and higher up the mountains to find a more comfortable climate.  And soon, they could be left with nowhere else to go.  Stuart Pimm is a conservation biologist at Duke University.  He says the planet could warm by two degrees Celsius or more in the coming decades and that could cause large scale extinctions.

STUART PIMM:  The very substantial fraction of species around the world, maybe 25%, live within two degrees of their nearest mountain top, and that means those species are going to be in very serious trouble and it’s a very significant fraction of the world’s biodiversity.

CHATTERJEE: For now, these are only projections.  The big unknown is what the world will do to control the emissions that scientists say are already threatening species and entire ecosystems.  For The World, I’m Rhitu Chatterjee.

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World.  The White House said today that President Obama is willing to work with Republicans on his legislative priorities including climate change. But yesterday’s election of a Republican to fill the senate seat held by the late Massachusetts Democrat Ted Kennedy may put climate legislation further out of reach.  Senator-elect Scott Brown campaigned against a comprehensive climate bill now working its way through Congress.  And his victory could also dim prospects for international cooperation on greenhouse gas pollution.  The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson has more.

PETER THOMSON: The chances of getting a comprehensive climate bill through the Senate this year were never good.  With yesterday’s Senate election in Massachusetts, its chances may have fallen toward zero.

FRANK MAISANO: I think it really punctures that balloon that we were going to have a climate bill this year that democratic leaders were still holding out for.

THOMSON: That’s Frank Maisano, an Energy Specialist at the firm of Bracewell and Guiliani. He represents energy companies and other big greenhouse gas emitters.  Maisano says it’s not just that the Senate may have lost a sure vote in favor of the pending climate bill.  It’s also that yesterday’s results showed that even voters in solidly democratic states are worried about the costs of climate legislation.  The Senate bill, sponsored by Barbara Boxer and John Kerry, would institute a cap and trade system for climate pollution.  That system would raise the cost of fossil fuels and, the argument goes, nudge industry toward cleaner energy.  Senator-elect Scott Brown campaigned against the bill, saying it would hit already reeling consumers in their pocketbooks.  And Frank Maisano says Brown’s victory likely will lead wavering senators in other key states to reject the bill as well.

MAISANO: It just won’t give folks who have to go back to those states in the Midwest and the Southeast and the mountain states, and it won’t give them any interest in supporting something that’s going to increase those costs to their constituents.

THOMSON: Supporters of the cap and trade bill say it includes mechanisms to reduce the economic impact on consumers.  But the bill is complicated, and those mechanisms would be indirect at best.  And yesterday’s election suggests that voters don’t seem to be in much of a mood to trust such promises. And that’s left even some supporters of strong action on greenhouse gas emissions saying its time to step back and simplify.

EILEEN CLAUSSEN: We need to do something that is simple and understandable and doesn’t include a lot of side deals.  And we could never pass a 2,000-page bill.

THOMSON: Eileen Claussen is the President of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.  She agrees that the sweeping Boxer-Kerry bill is dead.  But she says it may still be possible to do something less sweeping but still important.  Claussen says there may well be sufficient support for an energy bill that’s more narrowly focused on how electricity is produced.

CLAUSSEN: Either a limit on utility emissions or some kind of a clean energy performance standard that requires us to be producing carbon-free electricity.

THOMSON: But if cap and trade really is off the table, at least for now, that could further cloud negotiations with other countries on an international deal to reduce greenhouse pollution.  The U.S. has already come under fire for proposing fairly modest emissions cuts at the recent Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen.  But even those targets were tied to the cap and trade bill.  And without a firm commitment from the U.S., other countries may waiver on their own promised emissions cuts. For the World, I’m Peter Thomson.

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman, this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH in Boston.  The reviews are in and most give thumbs down on the Copenhagen climate summit.  The critics include Britain’s Prime Minister.  Gordon Brown called the non-binding agreement at best flawed, at worst chaotic.  His government accused China of blocking major agreements.  China responded that it’s already doing a lot to deal with global warming.  One of the more positive assessments of the summit came from its Danish hosts; they called it better than nothing.  The World’s Environment Editor Peter Thomson is back from Copenhagen.  Better than nothing Peter?  Is that the best that can be said?

PETER THOMSON: Well even President Obama who was the catalyst in brokering this agreement said that it was insufficient, far insufficient to meet the task and really just a first step.  So there really is a sense even from those who made the final agreement happen that it’s far less than we need, far less than they hoped for.

MARCO: Now you mentioned the one thing that was actually put back in, into the final draft of the agreement that you had not heard until actually today, right?

PETER: Yeah.  Well I mean this document has been in play since well into the last week and even over the weekend I was looking at what I thought was the final version of it and then this morning I come in and I look at the UNFCCC’s, the UN’s official final version and it’s got an interesting number back in there that had not been in there over the weekend.

MARCO: What is that?

PETER: That is one point five degrees Celsius.  It says at the top of this document that we recognize that the science says that we should try and keep global temperatures under a rise of two degrees Celsius as the threshold for dangerous climate change.  At the end of the document, previous versions had said we should reassess that in a bit and maybe think about one point five.  That was out of what I thought was the final version.  Now it’s back in and the final version says that we should look in the future to come back and look at this temperature threshold of a one point five degree rise and that’s really crucial because a lot of the least developed countries, the countries that are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, are saying we have to hold global temperatures to one point five degree rise.  And they were some of the ones who were the most critical of this accord.  So that’s back in and that’s interesting.

MARCO: That half a degree Celsius would make a huge difference for countries that are low lying like Vanuatu and Tuvalu who are facing sea rises.

PETER: Sure.  Nobody knows exactly what it’s going to mean but certainly I mean, even that what sounds like a small difference, half a degree Celsius could be life and death.

MARCO: Now top British officials used words like chaotic and farcical even to describe the talks in Copenhagen.  How did it feel for you on the conference floor?

PETER: Well sure as has heck chaotic.  I mean all weeklong I arrived on Monday and from the get go when it took me six hours just to get into the building and I was lucky.  There were colleagues of mine, journalists accredited who didn’t, who sat in line for ten hours outdoors and did not get in; to Friday when talks seemed on the verge of collapse we had all this back and forth between Obama and Premier Wen of China.  Nobody knew what was going to come out of it and then finally about 9:00 in the evening after the official program was supposed to have finished by noon, we have word that Obama has brokered this deal and we hear about how it happened.  We hear that maybe he burst into this meeting of China and Brazil and India, or maybe he was invited, nobody really knows.  And all of that is sort of off the official program.  The official program is supposed to be 192 countries negotiating stuff together, and what we have actually is like the world’s biggest players going off into a back room someplace and hammering something out, and ultimately getting this agreement between the two biggest players which are the US and China which had seemed totally out of reach just hours before.

MARCO: It does seem kind of crazy there on the floor.  One thing that you know we might have forgotten in all of the discussion of the treaty and agreements, is that there is kind of a trade show quality to this with a lot of green activists and people selling stuff on the sides and countries having their booths in a convention center.

PETER: Yeah I mean nobody was actually selling stuff per se but there was a whole section that was devoted to NGOs and business and countries to sort of promote their position and their technology.  It was, it really did have a trade show feel to it.  And then of course there were the country delegation offices, which were off in another whole other side of the building.  And an interesting thing is that every country had one office for their delegation, except for the United States, which had two.  And this really came back to the crux of the problem to a large degree, was the split between our administration and our congress.  The administration has certain goals, congress has been reluctant to go along with them.

MARCO: And you really mean that Congress had a booth and the White House had a booth.

PETER: Yeah.  They weren’t booths they were offices.

MARCO: I see, okay.

PETER: They were delegation offices.  And that was something that a lot of people remarked on, yeah.

MARCO: So the key question is what happens next, Peter.  There are talks slated for Bonn in Germany next summer then again in Mexico City a year from now.  What are the goals?

PETER: Well I mean there’s a lot going on here and the talks in Bonn and Mexico City are part of this official Kyoto UN framework convention on climate change process that continues even though this document did not actually have sort of the force of their stamp of approval coming out of that.  They will attempt, you know to continue the dialogue, move things forward.  But there are important things that are going to happen before then.  One is that this document, the Copenhagen Accord has this annex that countries have to submit their national plans for emissions reductions by January 31^st of 2010, just a month, a little more than a month from now, and that’s a key thing that the US got these countries to agree to, China and India in particular was to put on paper for the rest of the world to see these are the things to which we are committing.  That has to be done by January 31^st.  That’s very important. It’s important in part because it’s going to pressure the Senate and part of, a lot of what was going on here was an effort to essentially assuage the concerns of the Senate that China and India were not going to commit to real reductions in their emissions and to oversight.  There’s also a provision in here for oversight of those developing countries, those large developing countries’ economies.  And that is also starting to be in progress.  So this is in some ways all aimed at the Senate in Washington.  And John Kerry has promised coming out of this meeting that he will push through a bill in Washington to commit the US to hard targets for carbon reduction.  So we have the official Copenhagen UN process, we have the US process in Washington, those are on different tracks but they have to converge.  And that’s kind of what people are hoping will come out of this is that Obama has somehow managed to put it on a track for those two to converge and only then do we really get progress.

MARCO: We’ll see where these two tracks end up.  The World’s Environment Editor Peter Thomson just back from Copenhagen thanks a lot.

PETER: Thanks Marco.

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Copenhagen deal reaction in quotes

President Barack Obama defended the accord he helped broker with China and other main powers. The non-binding pact, called the Copenhagen Accord, was not adopted by consensus at the summit in Denmark. Instead, after two weeks of frantic negotiations, the 193-nation conference ended on Dec 19th with delegates merely taking note of the deal. At the end of the conference President Obama described the accord as a “meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough” but said much work was still be needed to reach a legally binding treaty.

Key points of Copenhagen Accord

Dec 21: Summit aftermath
Marco Werman discusses with our environment editor Peter Thomson where global efforts to combat climate change stand after the Copenhagen summit.
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Evolution of the accord: some of the Copenhagen drafts (pdf):

Draft 1
Draft 2
Draft 3
Draft 4
Draft 5
Near final draft

UN’s Copenhagen Climate Summit homepage with final version of the “Copenhagen Accord”

In his address to the conference, the President had called on world leaders to come together to strike a deal on the final day of the two-week UN climate summit in Copenhagen.

Video of President Obama’s full address to the climate conference

Coverage on The World:

Dec 18: “meaningful agreement”
Marco Werman talks with The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson about the deal reached in Copenhagen.
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Dec 17: deadlock continues
World leaders remain deadlocked on a host of issues just a day before the Copenhagen climate summit is scheduled to end. Anchor Marco Werman gets an update from The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson, who is in Copenhagen.
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Peter Thomson’s photos from the Copenhagen summit

Dec 17: China in Copenhagen
China has resisted calls for it to agree to binding verifiable targets for reducing emissions. But people in China say their government should be willing to make a commitment in Copenhagen. The World’s Mary Kay Magistad reports from Beijing.
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Dec 16: Time running out
Chances are growing slim that world representatives meeting in Copenhagen will come up with a deal on climate change. The World’s Peter Thomson reports on chaos at the conference.
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Demonstrators march toward the Bella Center where the UN climate summit is taking place (Photo: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Dec 16: climate deal still possible?
Anchor Marco Werman speaks with former US climate negotiator Kathleen McGinty. She was a member of the U.S. delegation to the Kyoto climate summit back in 1997. She says a climate agreement is still possible in Copenhagen.
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Dec 16: Climate change in Peru
Climate change is having an effect on agriculture in Peru. Farmers in the Peruvian mountains are adapting to rising temperatures by planting at higher and higher elevations. Jon Beaupre reports.
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Illustrated transcript of this story

Dec 16: Parsing global climate change polls
Have you ever wondered why two polls on climate change, both done by credible organizations and both asking not dissimilar questions, can come up with strikingly different results? Science journalist Dan Grossman tried to find out from political scientist Richard Worthington.

Read Dan’s blog from Copenhagen

Dec 15: Climate change and the oceans
During the conference, Peter Thomson had the chance to talk with Margaret Caldwell, director of the Environmental and Natural Resources Law and Policy Program at Stanford University, about the impact of increasing greenhouse gas emissions on the oceans.  Despite being a major part of the climate system, oceans are not on the agenda at the conference.
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Dec 14: Crunch time in Copenhagen
There’s little time left for climate negotiators at the conference in Copenhagen. The summit has less than a week to go. Anchor Marco Werman speaks with The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson, who is in the Danish capital to cover the summit.
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Dec 14: Climate migrants in Bangladesh
Scientists say droughts, floods and rising seas could drive millions of so-called climate migrants from their homes by later this century.
Floods have already been a very real problem in low-lying Bangladesh. Joanna Kakissis reports from southwestern Bangladesh.
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Dan Grossman’s Copenhagen blog
Science reporter Daniel Grossman is in Copenhagen to cover the climate summit. He is also blogging for The World: in his first entry, Daniel describes a visit to an unassuming, but very eco-friendly dwelling just outside the Danish capital.
Daniel Grossman’s Copenhagen blog

Impact of climate change
As world leaders gather in Copenhagen for the Climate Change Summit 2009, BBC reporters have traveled the globe to see the impact of the issue on people and the places they live in:
View the interactive map with BBC video reports

Dec 11: EU pledge to climate fund
The European Union has pledged $ 10.5 billion over three years to help developed nations deal with climate change. Now it’s looking to other big polluters, like the US and China, to make a contribution. The World’s Gerry Hadden reports.
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Dec 11: Canada’s rush toward energy reform
The Canadian province of Ontario has embraced renewable energy. But the province’s headlong rush into solar, geothermal and wind power has angered some residents. Anita Elash reports.
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Dec 10: Underground energy concerns
To produce cleaner energy, companies and governments are looking underground. That’s got project neighbors worried. The World’s Gerry Hadden reports from Landau, Germany.
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Chief Engineer Joerg Baumgaertner and Geox CEO Branka Rogulic at their geothermal power station. This plant provides enough power for about 6,000 homes. (Photo: Gerry Hadden)

More pictures for this story

Dec 9: Conflict in Copenhagen
There has been tension at the Copenhagen climate summit – but it wasn’t a dispute between industrialized countries and developing nations. Developing nations started arguing among themselves. Anchor Marco Werman talks the BBC’s environmental correspondent, Richard Black.
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Richard Black’s ‘Earth Watch’ blog

Dec 9: Campaigning for Kiribati
Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Alex Randall, a volunteer with the group UN-fair-Play. He’s in Copenhagen to help small countries with environmental concerns get heard at the summit.
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Dec 9: Paris heat wave offers lessons on climate change
In 2003, Europe was hit by a major heat wave. It caused the death of about 1,200 people in Paris. Now the city is trying to learn from that tragedy, as it plans for the kind of extreme temperatures climate change could bring. Reporter Daniel Grossman has the story.
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Daniel Grossman’s Copenhagen blog

Dec 8: Assessing India’s green energy promises
As climate negotiators huddle in Copenhagen, India is promising to reduce its greenhouse emissions with a big boost in green energy. But as Miranda Kennedy reports, there are big question marks as to whether India can deliver.
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Dec 8: Climate activists get creative
Activists are staging creative demonstrations at the climate change summit in Copenhagen. The World’s Marina Giovannelli looks at how different protest groups are vying for a spot on the international stage, and whether or not their efforts will sway the outcome of the negotiations.
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• Website for Climate Justice Action
• Video performance by The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home

Dec 7: Pride v practicality in India’s climate stance
India is resisting steep binding cuts in greenhouse emissions. Reporter Miranda Kennedy tells us why.
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Dec 4: Climate science fracas
The United Nations is conducting an investigation into claims that British scientists manipulated data on global warming to support their argument that it’s man made. The World’s Laura Lynch has the story.
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Dec 4: China and US jockey on climate
China is set to play a big role at next week’s climate talks in Copenhagen. Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Orville Schell of the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations, about the steps China is taking to clean up the environment, and its image.
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From the BBC:

• Copenhagen Summit 2009
• An animated journey through the Earth’s climate history

Other weblinks:

• COP15 Copenhagen homepage
• The White House blog: on the ground in Copenhagen
• New York Times: Copenhagen Climate Talks
• Washington Post: The Climate Agenda
• Greenpeace International
• Environmental Protection Agency at Copenhagen 2009

• Video: The President’s address to the climate conference
• Our coverage of Copenhagen 2009
• Peter Thomson’s Copenhagen photos
• Environment coverage on The World
• BBC coverage

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World. It’s been a hectic day at the Copenhagen climate summit for President Obama. Early on the president urged delegates to reach an agreement on how to combat climate change even, he said, if it’s an imperfect agreement. Mr. Obama may have gotten his wish. Just as the climate summit was about to close a US official told reporters that President Obama has reached a meaningful agreement with other world leaders and that official said the agreement is not sufficient to fight climate change but is an important first step. The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson is there at the summit in Copenhagen. Peter what are you hearing about this agreement? What makes it meaningful?

PETER THOMSON: Well we just don’t know. And in fact I’m not sure that anybody who was in the room with the president when he announced that knows. My understanding is it was just a small pool of White House reporters with the president and I’m not sure that any details were given to them and those details that they got are sort of only slowly washing across the conference center here in Copenhagen.

WERMAN: And any sense about how it’s going to kind of jive with the two degree Celsius level that everybody’s looking at?

THOMSON: Well I’ll tell you if the deal they’re talking about now reflects at all the latest draft of the accord that I’ve seen not very well. The previous drafts were pretty weak. This is even weaker. And again this was the latest draft that I saw and it could be out the window by now. But it even … . It mentioned two degrees as the target not to exceed that in terms of total warming over an undetermined amount of time. But it didn’t give a timeline for that. And it didn’t give any particular targets for how to achieve that. So they’re saying meaningful. What we’re seeing here is a little less meaningful.

WERMAN: What else happened today in Copenhagen Peter that led up to this kind of unofficial announcement of a meaningful agreement? There was a lot of stuff happening behind closed doors.

THOMSON: Oh there sure was. And I mean you said a minute ago that this agreement came just as the meeting was about to close. The meeting was actually supposed to close many hours ago. They were supposed to wrap things up this morning Copenhagen time and have this sort of big handshake and picture taking session and signing ceremony and everything this afternoon. That’s long gone. All that’s been canceled. People have been running around. Meetings have been being held behind closed doors. Other things have been cancelled. Just a moment ago as I was waiting to come on here I heard that the EU was holding a press conference. It’s the first press conference that we’ve actually heard announced today that’s going to be held as scheduled. And the EU obviously is a very significant player here so stuff is popping right now. And we are well past the deadline. The big issues are verification. The US is determined to get China and other developing countries to provide verification for the emissions cuts that they say they are going to make and to make sure that the international community can count on those being made. It’s the old Ronald Reagan term trust but verify. The administration is dead set on that and the Chinese are dead set against it. They say that’s a violation of their sovereignty. But they are making small moves in terms of talking about increased transparency and better means of communication and the like.

WERMAN: And Peter apparently Barack Obama and Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premiere, met twice today. Do have any sense of what was going on in those meetings?

THOMSON: Well nobody really knows for sure but apparently Wen Jiabao was fairly upset by some of the language that President Obama used in his speech to the assembly today on that question of verification and took some offense at it. And it seems that it took two meetings to work out that diplomatic snafu. Exactly where they came out of it we don’t know but we are hearing that China is party to this new agreement that also involves Brazil and South Africa and the US. Now obviously those are only four players. Three of them are quite big players. But it doesn’t involve everybody yet.

WERMAN: Peter with just a few seconds to go, give us the mood right now as delegates in Copenhagen wait for some announcement.

THOMSON: Well I think there’s a sense of the sort of increase chaos. It’s been chaotic all week but things are suddenly just picking up and nobody knows what’s going on but everybody knows something is going on. There’s this incredible anticipation but I think there’s also an expectation that what ever does happen it’s still going to be a very, very weak document coming out of here.

WERMAN: The World’s environment editor Peter Thomson at the summit in Copenhagen. We’ll stay in touch. Thanks a lot Peter.

THOMSON: Thank you Marco.

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Photo by Lonely Planet Photographer Christer Fredriksson

Ah, the joys of traveling to conferences, right? Imagine being in Copenhagen, Denmark this week, trying to elbow your way through world leaders, climate conference delegates, thousands of protesters, and the police. Well, while delegates to the United Nations Climate Conference try to hammer out a deal on global climate change, we here at Talking Travel are using it as an excuse to talk about Copenhagen, and the rest of Denmark, as a tourist destination. Robert Reid and Tom Hall from travel publisher Lonely Planet are on hand as usual to help us out. We’ll take you beyond The Little Mermaid statue and Tivoli Gardens. You’ll hear about Copenhagen’s bicycle-friendly streets, and about the city’s edgy, but hip meat-packing district, Vesterbro. You’ll also get the skinny on Christiana, a military camp turned commune that offers visitors a very different experience. We’ll also fill you in on an interesting tourism campaign that Denmark launched earlier this year. It featured a young woman who claimed to be searching for the father of her baby. The ad, which went up on YouTube, seemed to suggest that Denmark is full of beautiful blonde people just waiting to have sex with any tourist who shows up.

That, naturally, leads us into a discussion of some of the stranger tourism campaigns we’ve heard about recently. We really liked the one about the sheriff in the Iowa town that was “arresting” drivers with out of state plates, not to ticket them, but to give lure them into staying the night!

And we end with some stories of holiday travel. Bug-infested closets in Burma, and less than comfy benches in Sydney Airport both make appearances. Do you have an unusual holiday travel story to share? Leave your comment below, or email us. Don’t forget to put “Holiday Travel” in the subject line of your email.

Don’t forget, both The World and Lonely Planet are on Facebook.

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Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman.  This is the World.  It was a raucous day at the global climate summit in Copenhagen.  Danish police fired pepper spray at protesters outside the conference venue.  Meanwhile disputes inside left major issues unresolved.  The president of the European Commission said he was disappointed with the lack of progress toward a climate treaty and time is running out.  The meeting ends in two days.  The World’s Peter Thomson is at the conference and has this report.

PETER THOMSON: The climate of the climate talks here in Copenhagen has been growing more acrimonious.  Delegates of poor nations staged a sort of work stoppage earlier in the week.  Rifts have been deepening between key players, including the US and China.  Meetings and events are being cancelled without explanation.  And then there are the protesters.  Many of them have been squeezed out of the meeting site as the UN tightens security with the arrival of scores of government ministers and heads of state.  In the snow outside the conference center this morning, a small group of observer delegates who say they’ve been barred from the conference site burned their credentials in protest.  Seno Tsuhah was among them.  She came here to represent thousands of farmers in India.

SENO TSUHAH: We are burning our badges because we are angry, to show our anger, that we want to tell the world that there should be no legitimacy without communities’ voices.

THOMSON: The mood was no less angry inside.  Just beyond the first security gates, delegates from Friends of the Earth International sat on the floor, saying they’d been denied access to the meeting hall itself.  Nnimmo Bassey, who came here from Nigeria, is Friends of the Earth’s chair.

NNIMMO BASSEY: We all have badges, we have secondary badges and were are all expecting to go in and we’ve been stopped.

THOMSON: Have they given you a reason?

BASSEY: The reason is security, and I don’t know what that means.  We believe it’s not just, it’s not right and it should not be tolerated.

THOMSON: Some of the demonstrations and sloganeering had a sort of pro-forma, pre-packaged feel to them and it’s possible that a good number of such supposedly spontaneous outbursts were planned long ago.  But the concern that this meeting could lead to no agreement, or to an agreement that falls far short of what’s needed, isn’t limited to protesters. Many delegates, scientists, and long-time observers of the treaty process fear the summit could end up being a failure.  Now, with two days left, many who’ve been most deeply involved in pushing for dramatic action are dramatically scaling back their expectations, and talking about it as just another meeting.  Elliot Diringer is with the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

ELLIOT DIRINGER: I think that an outcome here is very likely to be disappointing in some respects to everyone who feels the need to move forward urgently.  But it’s the process we have.  We have to look to it to deliver as much as possible.

THOMSON: It’s possible that with President Obama and more  than 100 other world leaders arriving in the next 24 hours, things could quickly change.  But Diringer and others say that even if Copenhagen doesn’t produce an agreement on climate change, they hope it moves the world a little further in that direction.  For The World, I’m Peter Thomson, in Copenhagen

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Marcelino Cruz

Cruz: “There used to be more rain in the past. These days, it seems as if it’s escaping.”

Reporter: It’s not much better during the dry season. Between the months of May and September, Cruz and his neighbors get their water from the nearby Copa Glacier. But temperatures here have been rising, and the glacier is rapidly diminishing. Over his 34 years, Cruz says the glacier has retreated about a mile and a quarter. The lack of water has affected production, Cruz says. Yields from his farm have decreased by forty percent in the last decade.

Cruz:“And it’s not just the water. We also have new pests. And frost – something we never used to have.”

Copa Glacier (photo: Kate Dunbar)

Reporter: Cruz is seeing the effects of what researchers have confirmed–that his small part of the world is experiencing a significant shift in its climate. The effects of climate change are also being felt a day’s journey away, at the edge of the Amazon jungle. That’s where a long and slim balsa takes us across the Marañon River to Yamayaka – to meet with Simon Wipe Bejus, a leader of the Awajun. It’s a steamy, 100 degrees or so here. Bejus is dressed in a headband of beans and feathers, with wide belts of red, white and black beans crossing his chest .

Bejus: “The climate is changing, The rain is scarce and the sun feels like three times what it used to be. The mountains are getting drier. And the River is much smaller. It really worries us here in the Amazon.”

Reporter: The Awajun grow plantains, yucca, maize and rice. But as in Copa up in the mountains, Bejus says their traditional lifestyle here is threatened.

Bejus:“The jungle is our market. Nature is our pharmacy. But with climate change, mining, oil exploration and illegal deforestation, the Amazon is getting polluted.”

Huancayo potato market

Maria Scurrah: This is another one, Paseña from Huancavelica. Loved in the market for its purple color…

Reporter: 400 miles away in Huancayo, plant breeder and pathologist Maria Scurrah guides me through the potato market. Peru is the birthplace of the potato, and the plentitude at the market is just a fraction of the thousands of varieties of potatoes grown here.

Scurrah: You can see that they native varieties are easy to tell because, you can see that plant breeders go for big, round, no eyes. Whereas the ancient varieties are the opposite; small, shriveled and deep eyes.

Reporter: Scurrah says that lately, Peru’s potato farmers have had to adjust to their changing climate :

Scurrah: “Well, one of the key adaptations that the farmers in the Andes are doing is really climbing up with their crops – only ten years ago you wouldn’t have seen a crop above 4,000 (meters) and those are all the bitter potatoes that are frost tolerant. And the top potatoes would have been at 3,900 (meters) – and now it’s very common to find crops at 4,200 (meters).”

Reporter: Growing potatoes at above 13,000 feet used to be unheard of. But Scurrah says there is a limit.

Scurrah: “As the globe heats up, people move up with their crops until the edge of what used to be highland pastures, not agriculture, And they will have nowhere to go after reaching that top line.”

Reporter: Peru itself is responsible for only about half a percent of all greenhouse gas pollution. But as climate change begins to affect life all over the country, the Peruvian government has adopted an ambitious plan to fight it. The goal is to decrease the country’s emissions by 47 percent by 2020. And to stop net deforestation in the Amazon entirely in just ten years as well. Eduardo Durand runs the government’s special agency for climate change.

Durand: “The reduction has to be very aggressive and very important in the first twenty years.”

Reporter: Durand believes Peru’s goals… and those of much of the rest of the world… can – and must be met:

Durand: “Otherwise we will have a very serious situation, and a very high cost of adaptation in the long term. So it’s better for everybody – developed and developing countries – to have a very bold and ambitious goal of reduction in the next step up until 2020.”

Reporter: Back up in Copa Grande, Marcelino Cruz is getting ready for the night shift as a guard at a rose plantation . Like many other farmers here, Cruz needs the extra income to support his family. Moving his farm somewhere else is not an alternative, he says. They probably don’t have enough water either. But as the climate continues to change, here. Cruz says he doubts own children will be able to stay in Copa Grande:

Cruz: “I hope my children will get a good education and get a job somewhere else. These fields will not be able to support them.”

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