Over - Sean Heron at the World Climate Change Conference

The following is copied from his user page at his request. It has not been edited.

Yes, its over. After a day of limbo (at least thats how I felt) the Climate conference (finally) ended yesterday. And how crazy was that last day. Some of you might have seen comments I was making on Wikinews, and I just have to say again that I was really relieved when the US so unexpectedly agreed to the amended text (I was up there on the press gallery giving them standing ovations together with the rest of the plenary :D). I really saw everything coming apart beforehand, and from the worried expressions of fellow journalists, I saw that others were thinking the same (those that I spoke only confirmed this). I was glad I didn't see the guys from Germanwatch I did the translation for till after it was over though, cause their policy guy (who does the lobby work), told me that he had also been afraid it might fail at the last minute, and I would have given quite something on his opinion! But I guess this might all be a bit of detail overload (I reckon it shows you were my heart is).

So what happened/what have I been doing in the second week here on Bali? One quite nice thing that springs to mind was being invited by the Canadian Journalist I'm sharing a bungalow with (Toby Heaps) to have Dinner with some guys from TV. Afraid I can't recall their names, but these two, both based in Beijing had some real interesting stories to tell, from the US base in Kabul till how to get around paying Bagshish (bribe, have absolutely no idea how its usually spelt) when travelling in Indonesia or elsewhere.

Oh right, I did the aforementioned translation for the German NGO Germanwatch. They released their climate risk index on Monday or Tuesday, and I translated the press release into english (that being one of a number of things that kept me up till late during that week, SVTCobra :D).

Otherwise I've been connecting up to some young people from Europe with a view to the next two conferences on Monday and Tuesday (when there wasn't too much happening to be reported on, as all the action was behind closed doors in small groups then; hmm, not that this changed too much towards later really...). But I guess I should stay more focused on the news side of things :).

The high level segment was a blessing for me: there were no parallel events and the speeches weren't contributing to the ongoing negotiations in any meaningful manner, so I actually haven't seen one of them :D. I was guessing that as this (to me) non event went on there were sure to be some delegates available to interview, so I sent out some requests. Unfortunately most remained unreplied, the only ones to really get back to me were the Brazilians, but he told me something I hadn't fully realized previously: That everybody was pretty engaged in negotiations within smaller groups, and that he therefore did not believe that I'd be able to get to talk with anyone (which is what happened).

I have the impression I'm not really in storyteller mode at the moment, so thats all for now, and I hope it wasn't too boring. I hope to add a bit more over the next few days!

Regards, Sean Heron.