Monday, December 05, 2005

Montreal: Dec 3,12: 32

Writing this while i am pretty tired so please excuse any mistakes on my part. Today was a pretty hectic day... I'll sum up all the major events. Solar gen had a meeting with Sven Teske about the plan for Arctic Day and Minister Day (both are theme days, planned by SolarGen with the mentioned themes in mind). We decided on what all will be done on these days. On Arctic Day we'll be doing stuff involving arctic ice melting, etc, around the exhibition area that we have> Also we'll be having polar bears walking around (maybe hounding a Bush figure!and getting into a fight with him). The Minister Day will involve the ministers who are arriving at the conference after Tuesday. It'll probably have the various ministers leaving their handprint on this huge globe that we are placing in the exhibition space. If it comes through , it'll have quite an impact and pretty good media coverage. These are just rough drafts of events slated for Tuesday and Wednesday. Also today there was a sort of demonstration + performance by all the youth groups in the conference which consisted of people wearing shorts and t-shirts walking towards the conference and singing climate change jingles. This sort of stuff may seem a bit funny here but it gets quite some media attention as well as the delegate's attention, so its a pretty cool means of pushing the message of renewables through. Also interesting in today's menu was the arrival of a group called C pact (or c fact)or something like that ...it consists of about 40 american students who are promoting nuclear energy. Thankfully they have been disowned by all other youth communities (which outnumber them 10 to 1. Also today I witnessed Sven take a nuclear energy promoter apart bit by bits. His arguments literally hit the guy's face....hard. Its very interesting to see people lobbying for nuclear energy when there is absolutely no future for it (simply because just like fossil fuels, nuclear fuel is running out as well). It was pretty interesting to see how the confrontation really works (even though I'll never be able to do it, I'm too diplomatic.... but I'm learning) Today we started working at the warehouse where all our banners, etc are being painted. Pretty nice place with all hardware tools , I got to work with the saw for a while when we were cutting plywood. And finally, yes, it snowed in Montreal, the temperature dropped to somewhere around -5 and I almost froze. There are worse weather predictions for tomorrow and tomorrow is also a march that we have planned along with a lot of other organisations aainst climate change. Thats all for now ...I think. I'll keep you posted.

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