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Romania on the road to Copenhagen

Published 22nd October 2009 - 1 comments - 2167 views -

photo source: Green Report

Romanian and European officials, along with representatives of major national players in the energy field will discuss about COP15, its significance and potential impact during "Romania on the road to Copenhagen", a conference organized by the representatives of the European Commission in Romania and Green Revolution Association. 

The conference will start tomorrow at 9.30 with an opening speech from the head of the European Commission in Romania, Nicolae Idu and discussions and presentations will go on until around 2pm. Held in Bucharest, the conference is a proper environment for building a constructive dialogue between the public and private sectors here. It's supposed to create the road map and prepare the general lines that we need to implement after a future climate protocol - hopefully to be defined in December, at Copenhagen - is signed and set.

Sulfina Barbu - chairman of the Committee on Public Administration, Territorial Planning and Ecological Balance, Mats Aberg - Ambassador of Sweden, Ionut Purica - Romanian Academy's expert on energy and climate, and Stephen Harrison - Director of Climate Change Risk Management are some of the officials attending this event. 

But before the actual road to Copenhagen, Romania will face something else. Tonight at midnight, the official presidential elections begin. It's not good news for the environment, as, unless some natural calamity occurs, the next month and a half all media will be focused solely on politics and candidates. As history has a bad habit of repeating itself, I presume nothing from the upcoming period will be green.

On the contrary - tons of flyers, posters, brochures and catalogues will be glued on every pole, wall and building, will be handed to people every day in the streets, will keep the homeless warm in the nights. Countless human and natural resources will be carelessly used to emphasize how green the grass is in one courtyard while all the others are filled with rotten apples.

You see, a climate conference could actually be good for raising mass awareness here, but it's a good deed which, unfortunately, takes place at the wrong time. In this country, times of elections are governed by just one rule - every candidate for himself. Literally. There's no room for environment, clean policies or CO2 emission counts. With all eyes turned to politics,  "Romania on the road to Copenhagen" will probably be even less than a tempest in a tea kettle for the population.

Category: UN Climate Change Conference 2009, | Tags: cop15, energy, romania, european commission,



Comments

Fotis on 12th December 2009:

The same happened in the Greek elections. Both parties claimed to be enviromentally friendly but not only produce a huge amount of leaflets etc but also hired charters to bring voters from US, UK and Germany that adds to the pollution.
UK has a site called a road to Copenhagen and might be useful for competition and ideas. Its encouraging that a country like Romania is participating at the debate. Our countries are not famous for being green.
Finally, I saw a documentary on the Greek tv about a gold mine in Romania that threatens to destroy a village and the forest around it. Im forgetting the name at the moment, but if you have an idea, do you know what is going on now?

p.s. I like the profession description

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