I have spent way too much time lately in bitter endless arguments. In deed, I have written some posts and comments out of affection rather than insight. Enough of that. There is so much else to write...

The Swedish voices series is not yet over. The next in line to meet my Flip will be some Swedish high school students participating in Klimatting Ett, a kind of local climate "parliament", where youth from Lund (my town) and other places worldwide will discuss climate change and try to come up with a message to the politicians meeting at the COP15.

The ad hoc parliament will meet for three days, starting today. Not only will participants discuss, they will also take part in work shops covering climate change and how citizens can act efficiently locally and globally. A full program in English can be found here (PDF link).

I will meet a few participants whose names I still don't know on Sunday morning, so if you have anything you want to ask or tell the young Swedes about citizens work against climate change, post it as a comment to this post.

The program had a kind of pre-opening event yesterday, that I did visit. It was a panel discussion with Oleg Izyumenko from 350.org, Petra Flaum from BaselineConsulting.se, a specialist in public sustainability policies, Richard Bengtsson from the energy company eON, Swedish masters in biogas slightly less controversial in these circles than their competitors Vattenfall these days and Kenneth Hermele, an left leaning human ecologist/economist who is world famous in Sweden.

The topic of discussion was climate change, consumption and global justice. It was as interesting as it sounds, and I think the heterogenous panel summed up a wide span of opinions and viewpoints. 350.org called for immediate action - maybe alarmist, but what is wrong about alarming if the threat is real? eOn's showed faith in green innovation and entrepeneurship. Symbolic for the different perspectives was that while Oleg wore a tie saying 350, Richard from eOn wore a button saying 2 degrees. Kenneth Hermele spoke in academically distanced terms and noticed that while Oleg was probably right that 350 ppm is probably necessary, even avoiding 2 degrees of warming will be very difficult to achive politically. Petra believed in the power of policy documents. She was critizised by the audience, but to just point out that most policy documents are useless is to simplify things, I think. No matter how difficult policies are to implement - they are important, while not allmighty.

The question that sparked most discussion was about global justice. Oleg did his part in pointing out who suffers from climate change - the poorest of the poor. Petra highlighted the colonialism in agreements that with a clear division of labour - profitable clean tech innovation is to be made in the North - factory shut downs in the South.

Richard from eOn actually challenged this view when highlighting that China is the leading country in solar technology, and that the north is not so superior as we think. I couldn't agree more. Citizens in the north have an important art to play, but we are not automatically leading the rest of the world. Much of the momentum is coming from civil movements in the south. Similarly, I don't see the EU pushing other countries in the way we say we do - third world leaders seem as innovative and serious about getting a deal in Copenhagen as anyone else.

This is not to put blame on anyone, or complain about the EU. My point is that the world is already much more complicated than it was in 1962, when Sweden started giving foreign aid. But many public comments in Sweden are still stuck in this thinking that we are lifting them, which is simply not true. The problems are shared, but so are the efforts to solve them.

After the discussion followed snacks and music by the local singer/songwriter Martin Tingsek, and since it was too dark to film inside, I will give you one of his songs here in stead...

While consuming the snacks I felt a little disheartened about the movement. In spite of the heterogenous panel, the audience was srikingly homogenous. We were all white middle class with a university degree (I don't know this, but I dare a bet on it...). There are so many kinds of Swedish people that are absent from this kind of debates - immigrants, workers, punks, small business owners... If the movenment should be succesful it must be truly global, and than it must be able to include any Swedes any Americans and any thirld world citizens.

I gave much space to my own thoughts in this post. On Sunday we will try to shut up and let the high school students do the talking. Bring on your questions!