I arrived in Copenhagen last night expecting a different scene, perhaps something more like the tent cities and angry protesters that greeted Bradley Whitford in last year’s strikingly relevant TV mini-series Burn-Up, which revolves around a global warming summit in Calgary.
Instead, I was received by a mellow city two days before the conclusion of the U.N.’s much-hyped climate conference.
At the main train station, there were a few posters here and there, but none of the crowds one might expect during an event of these proportions. Outside, despite a significant snowfall, people seemed to be going about their normal business: The buses were running smoothly and bikers were out en masse. Though packed, local trains continued to run as if nothing was abnormal about this week.
This is the untold story of the Copenhagen summit: This city is built to work, even under pressure.
By most accounts, I probably missed the biggest crowds. A 60,000 or more-person protest took place on Saturday. At the Bella Center, where the meetings are taking place, the most vocal constituency now appears to be an assembled mass of the vegetarian followers of Supreme Master Ching Hai. On Thursday they were passing out vegan sandwiches and their Master’s great oeuvre, The Birds in My Life. No joke.
But there was also continued evidence of the conference and its more mainstream participants — everywhere, their presence could be felt throughout the city.
Copenhagen’s infrastructure is able to handle the load handsomely. The two metro lines opened in 2002 and are fully automated, they have no drivers, and they include platform walls in the underground stations to prevent people from falling onto the tracks. Trains run more than every two minutes and even continue all night, meaning that service to the city’s most important districts is always available. The S-Tog suburban trains share the same zone fare system as the metro, allowing commuters to use the same tickets for both. More excitingly for the internet-obsessed among us, these vehicles feature free wireless connections.
The city’s vaunted bicycling network, which carries 40% of all traffic, holds up to its reputation. On streets across town, city maintenance crews were clearing ice off of bike routes — before tackling either sidewalks or roadways! Parking spaces for two-wheelers are to be found everywhere, and there are so many bikes that most people don’t appear to even lock them up.
These approaches, which favor public transport and car-free living, make Copenhagen a very livable place most of the year, but also have allowed it to host this large conference with minimal intrusion on the life of the city. The investment the Danes have made in their infrastructure provides a model for what similar American cities could do if they wanted to work towards a veritable transformation.
President Obama returns to Copenhagen for the second time this year — the first was to support his home city Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympic Games, which it lost to Rio. He should note the investments this city has made in its transportation systems and perhaps, in doing so, he might recognize the primary failure of Chicago’s effort, which was its inability to mobilize funding for significant improvements to its century-old rapid transit network. Copenhagen can manage a big event like this one, no problem — would our cities be capable of the same?
Tags: Copenhagen
I think the rapturous applause for Hugo Chavez says it all about the conference. The movement is anti-capitalist and anti-American at its heart. If they really believed there was a climate crisis they would have done this online rather than have hundreds of thousands of unnecessary flights, limos, foods from all corners etc. Any deal that leaves China and India to carry on uninterrupted is pointless. A farce and a tragedy mixed in one.
And behind it all, no true science. They can’t replicate their results because they lost the data and their computer model is a hopeless sham. The data is without integrity and has been manipulated within an inch of its life. All that’s left is the politics, maybe that’s all there ever was.
I’ve been getting very different reports from a friend who is involved in the conference itself. She says she has “never seen a city so locked down”. Disruptions probably increase exponentially when you get closer to the action.
Has Denmark invested any money in huge road projects? Or is it all trains and bikes? Hint: Google “Oresund Bridge”. Your reporter needs to get off the bike paths once in a while.
Only 4 lanes of roadway for the most important land route in Scandinavia.
And a set of tracks.
Tells you something.
Eric, A hint, do a bit more googling and you would find that the Oresund Bridge also has high speed rail that is about twice as fast as driving. There is congestion but it it in the train stations due to the high demand for rail.
Joe, anyone who the US has bombed is anti-American, so it adds up together to a lot of people.
And no, the data hasn’t been lost. One set of data was lost. Other sets are still around, and confirm the findings of higher temperatures.
I went to Copenhagen this summer, and it WAS awesome. It is the most beautiful city in the world! With the bike lanes, you forgot to mention that they are completely separated from the roads in the downtown, just like sidewalks. Also, they bike lanes and roads often have many trees in between them, so you don’t have to worry about cars AT ALL.
Denmark is not only Copenhagen. While the capital has done a good job with transit and bicycle infrastructure the same can not be said for the country as a whole. When it comes to intercity travel, the private car is the obvious choice as the country has an excellent motorway system while intercity rail is seriously underdeveloped.
None of the data is intact – the corrupted/’value-added’ data was used to calibrate the two satellite datasets and the other ground dataset, so all four are useless. They cherry-picked weather stations and eliminated rural stations that showed cooling, and to compensate for the urban heat island effect they adjusted the urban station data upwards. Again – upwards.
It has also been shown that any random data fed into the computer model will produce the ‘hockey stick’ shape, which ignores the medieval period that was warmer than now, and the little ice age in the 18th century that froze the Thames.
They have to start from scratch with real scientists. The head of the IPCC is a railroad engineer making money from a dozen green venture capital funds, and Al Gore is a divinity school dropout pocketing fistfuls of cash with his snake-oil roadshow. Follow the money, which favors the climate scam 100-1 over big oil.
It has been shown? By who – some Exxon-funded hack?
As for the Medieval Warm Period: it’s unclear whether it ever existed outside Europe. The same is true for the Little Ice Age. The current warming is global – and no, it’s not just corrupted data – each of those global datasets shows the same warming.
“None of the data is intact”
Yes, it is intact.
Stop lying. Visit realclimate.org if you are really interested, which you aren’t because you’re a denier.
There are 4 major data sets, 2 on the ground and 2 satellite-based. The CRU dataset is corrupted beyond repair (if you dispute that then there’s no point continuing the discussion) and it is used to calibrate the satellite data, so of course they correlate.
The satellites don’t measure temperature directly, so they need the ground data to generate their temperature readings. The other ground set is also correlated to the CRU set, so guess what? All four are f**ked. A totally artificial ‘adjustment’ upwards like a staircase is applied (based on nothing) so of course it shows warming. One or two trees out of hundreds in Siberia were used to show the dramatic warming, when you use all of them the temperature fluctuates normally.
The Russians are now saying their data has been misused, and the unadjusted data in New Zealand also shows no significant warming. Either reproduce the results or start over. It’s not science if it isn’t repeatable.
There is 1000x more money in promoting global warming than there is on the other side. How many climate-change-denying billionaires are there? Al Gore and the head of the IPCC (neither are climate scientists by any stretch) are laughing all the way to the bank on the hundreds of millions they’re making off of this, as are the carbon credit traders in Europe. It’s a cash cow for everyone but Exxon-funded hacks.
Those aren’t lies, they are inconvenient truths. If the would-be world government types really believed in global warming they wouldn’t swan around the world on private jets talking about it, and Al Gore wouldn’t have a 100-foot houseboat and a 20,000 sq ft house. If China and India continue building coal plants every other week, what’s the point? Any deal that doesn’t involve them is a pointless exercise and an admission that it’s all about punishing the west and transferring wealth.
If you bother replying, state your case but don’t make it a personal attack on me.
Joe, the problem is that you’re not providing references to anything. You expect people to trust your expertise, while not proving any actual expertise. On the contrary – ranting about “1000x more money” makes you look like a hack. ExxonMobil profited 45 billion dollars in 2008; 1000x more money is about the same as the world’s entire GDP. That’s where the personal attacks come from: there’s no real argument to attack.
If you want a list of oil industry billionaires, here are a few key figures in conservative philanthropy: Philip Anschutz, David Koch, Charles Koch. All of those are much richer than Gore. In addition, Bill Gates’ resident pseudo-expert, Nathan Myhrvold, believes in geoengineering, even those schemes whose inventors are skeptical about their applicability.