Summary Report (COP25), Madrid, Spain December, 2019 By David Simpson and Jane Lapiner Closing Comments: One Last Chance click on photos for larger images; uncredited photos by Jane Lapiner The 12 day-long (It was originally intended to last only 10) 25th Conference of the Parties (COP 25), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), was finally held in the cavernous halls of El […]

Summary ReportDecember 2018By David Simpson and Jane Lapiner Summary Report (COP 24): Katowice, Poland 2018 As the great 24th Conference of the Parties (COP) wound down in mid-December and a fleet of trucks began hauling the dismembered pieces of the of the event’s enormous structures back for storage in Lyon, France, 23,000 government and civil society representatives and the Press began their own long treks home […]

Report #3 November, 2017By David Simpson and Jane Lapiner Two Anniversaries There are two anniversaries being noted in the halls of COP 23.  One is the 4th anniversary of COP 19 that took place in the national soccer stadium that doubles as a convention hall in Warsaw. It had been a stirring meeting that saw the largest walkout in COP history (800 civil society representatives). […]

Report #2 November, 2017By David Simpson and Jane Lapiner Opening Day of COP23 The opening day of COP 13 went smoothly, one blessedly brief speech by a climate luminary followed by another without a hitch but also without anything resembling the luster that an event of this magnitude might be expected to demand. Until, that is, the official sponsors of the event, the Fijians, offered […]

David Simpson and Jane Lapiner travelled to Bonn, Germany from their home in Petrolia, California to attend and report on the United Nations climate summit. Report #1 October 31, 2017By David Simpson and Jane Lapiner Ambition in Bonn: Dare We Still Hope Two years after the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the world’s nations are meeting in Bonn, Germany for the 23rd Conference of the […]

Report #2November 15-16, 2016By David Simpson and Jane Lapiner The Post Obama Climate Change Era COP 22, the fifteen or maybe even 30 ring circus the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is putting on in the middle of a broad, muddy field at the edge of Marrakech, Morocco is directly under the flight path of big jetliners ascending from the Rak airport toward […]

David Simpson and Jane Lapiner traveled to Marrakech, Morocco from their home in Petrolia, California last week to attend and report on the United Nations climate summit.   Report #1 November 12, 2016By David Simpson and Jane Lapiner So Much to Lose The BBC weather woman, with an outline of almost the whole Mediterranean region on the wall just behind her, was conventionally brisk and unbothered […]

Summary Report (COP21), Paris, FranceJanuary 18, 2016By David Simpson and Jane Lapiner Marching Orders David Simpson and Jane Lapiner traveled to Paris from their home in Petrolia, California in Fall 2015 to attend and report on the United Nations climate summit. This is their summary report click on photos for larger images The Call A friend called the day after the late-night conclusion of the Conference […]

Report #4 Winter Solstice, 2014By David Simpson and Jane Lapiner Overview (Ambition Versus the Low Carbon Economy: In Lima with the UN, 2014) Photo library at bottom. Recently returned from the desert shoreline of sub-equatorial Peru where it rarely rains, we arrived back to the deep green of a North Coast rainy season wet enough in its first half to put our part of California’s […]

Report #3 December 8th through 10th, 2014By David Simpson and Jane Lapiner Commentary on some events from Days 6 through 8 of the UN climate summit. If rhetoric were effective action, the world would indeed have been saved on day seven of the 2014 UN climate change COP 20. This was officially the first day of the High Level negotiations and it was peppered, after […]