Every day this week, as commuters poured into central Paris, I joined the thousands trekking out to the Le Bourget banlieue for COP21, the UN climate change conference.
The train emerges above ground after the Gare du Nord. Satellite dishes sprout like mushrooms from high-rise housing projects. Walls are covered with graffiti. The path to Le Bourget is littered with burnt-out cars and uncollected rubbish.
I briefly wondered why the French government had not embarked on a massive beautification campaign, like those Third World dictatorships who prettify slums along the airport road in preparation for visits by foreign dignitaries.
The Le Bourget exhibition park, the site of the Paris air show every second year and home to the national aviation and space museum, is two stops after the Stade de France, where three suicide bombers blew themselves up on November 13th. It is also just a few kilometres from Saint-Denis, where three people, including the alleged mastermind of the Paris attacks, were killed when security forces stormed a jihadist hideout on November 18th.
The shuttle bus that takes you from the RER train station to the conference passes Turkish and Pakistani restaurants, women in long robes and headscarves and the occasional man wearing Salafist attire. Local residents are mostly African, Arab and Asian, like many of the passengers in the shuttle buses. Except that the locals are poor immigrants, while passengers in the brand new hybrid buses are members of the global elite, a caste of well-travelled diplomats, journalists, academics and UN officials.
Globalisation
I mention to Pierre-Henri Guignard, secretary general of COP21 and the French diplomat entrusted with the task of organising the conference, that I covered the 1982 G7 summit at the Palace of Versailles. The country has changed a lot since then. Globalisation may have raised standards of living elsewhere, but for France it has meant a serious downgrade.
Guignard was assigned to organise COP21 on returning from Washington in mid-2013. The Le Bourget site had already been chosen; the UN said it was the only place big enough for the conference.
"I'd spent much of my career abroad, and Le Bourget was a France I didn't know," Guignard says. "But this is the reality. What do you expect us to do? Versailles again? This is where we need to do things. It's good to show France as she is. Remember, when we won the World Cup in 1998, everyone talked about 'La France black blanc beur' [black, white and Arab]. We're in that frame of mind. There's a large foreign population here. There's no reason to hide it."
Best possible image
A phalanx of mostly African and Arab youths greet you off the RER train with a cheery “hello” in several languages. Gendarmes with assault rifles stand behind them.
The youths are among the 600 underprivileged teenagers recruited by Guignard to help with COP21. Their training included English lessons from the British Council, and they will receive job placement after the conference.
“At COP20 in Lima, everyone smiled all the time,” Guignard says. “It had me worried, because I thought, ‘We’re going to do this in Paris, France, where people have a reputation for being unpleasant?’ In training, we insisted that they convey the best possible image.”
A forest of white columns with the name and flag of all 195 UN members stands outside the entry to COP21. Visitors pose for photographs in front of the column representing their country.
There was something touching about the pride of Palestinians taking pictures of each other. Only two months have passed since the Palestinian flag was allowed to be flown at the UN.
One enters the conference through an enormous hangar resembling an airport terminal. There are queues in front of dozens of metal detectors. The procedure is the same as for boarding a plane. The UN dispatched 106 “blue guards” from cities as far away as Bangkok, Nairobi and New York. They supervise local security subcontractors and scan the barcode on your COP21 badge, which is also scanned on departure.
France has temporarily relinquished sovereignty over the “blue zone”, signifying UN control. French security forces are poised outside the centre to intervene, should the UN request it.
The main street of the blue zone is called the Champs-Élysées. It looks like an industrial zone with factories lined up on either side.
Larger than life, brightly coloured animals in translucent plastic provide a touch of colour. Framed squares of ivy, moss and other plants hang vertically on the sides of six giant warehouse-like halls.
At the end of this Champs-Élysées, there is a red Eiffel Tower, made from folding chairs. It twinkles in the evening, just like the real one, and is a rendezvous point for the conference.
It took 60 construction firms 45 days to build the conference centre, a small town populated daily by 45,000 people. The toilets are the cleanest I have seen in France.
Conference president and French foreign minister Laurent Fabius took an interest in every detail, Guignard says.
“He said, ‘One judges a man by his shoes and a house by its toilets’.”
Annexes are meant to associate civil society and the business community with COP21. People are searched between each venue. A European space shuttle and ageing French fighter aircraft are parked behind the exhibition halls like discarded toys.
There is an unspoken dress code at COP21: neo-hippie for the NGOs, tailored for national delegations. Indigenous North Americans, Amazonian Indians and Buddhist monks stand out, with feathered head-dresses, shaved heads and robes.
Some 4,000 journalists populate the media centre in Hall 5, where the workspace reflects our position on the food chain. Television networks enjoy closed offices. Radio journalists work two to a cubicle. Print journalists are lined up at assembly line tables. You receive more than 100 emails daily, but nothing on paper.
"Your problem is there is so much going on. How do you even begin to report?" UN climate chief Christiana Figueres told a press conference. Except that most of the "theme days" and worthy briefings – on agriculture, forests, women and climate change, the power of youth, carbon-pricing, etc – have little or nothing to do with the text of the agreement.
Climate neutral
Meanwhile, 1,500 negotiators haggle in groups and spin-off groups behind the closed doors of 35 conference rooms. They have chewed over the same arguments for years: should the accord limit the rise in temperature to 1.5 or 2 degrees? Who will pay the $100 billion (€95 billion) promised to developing countries?
The words “renewable energy” were kept out of the draft agreement at the demand of the Saudis.
Even the substitute “decarbonisation” was deemed too strong and replaced this week with “climate neutral”. Tension runs so high that one of the diplomats known as a “facilitator” encouraged negotiators to insert smiley symbols in their texts.
The atmosphere is serious, but lacks intensity. Thousands of people seem to roam aimlessly, as if at a fair, among colourful national pavilions.
‘We’re watching you’
At lunch-time the other day, a dozen youths wearing Guantánamo orange jumpers emblazoned with the words “X Divest” and “#Keep it in the ground” stood in front of the red Eiffel Tower shouting: “Real leaders divest from fossil fuels.”
Several had drawn circles around one eye, signifying “Zero carbon” and “We’re watching you”. They were trying to put pressure on negotiators, a Canadian student told me.
Katie Dagg (23), a student of international relations from Dublin, was hired to distribute “welcome kits” comprised of a recycled bag that says, “This was a sweater”, a re-usable water canteen and a biro. Like her, I was disappointed it contained no food.
Dagg spends her breaks talking to academics, people from NGOs and delegates.
“I have the impression there are a lot of ethical people here. They want to do good,” Dagg says. “The conference is raising awareness of climate change, but I’m afraid in the end we’re just going to put it off again.”
I ask Dagg if it is disheartening to be young in a world blighted by jihadist massacres and climate change.
“Not at all,” she replies. “I want to change the world.”
