Day 2

I think I've figured out the issue with the Party leaders. I was attending a side event hosted by the Adaptation Committee, and one of the guest speakers mentioned that he was impressed with the Committee's coordination with national agencies. He said that national agencies tend to be "more nimble" than UN groups, i.e. not bogged down by layers of politics.

Speaking of politics, look at this fancy food. It was set out after the event.

The higher in the chain of command you are, the more broad your actions have to become. It's like energy transfer in organisms. There's an energy drop from primary producers to primary consumers to secondary consumers--a loss in calories by a factor of 10 at each level. The Party leaders, having responsibility over much larger groups, lose effectiveness in the specific. So, maybe I was being too harsh yesterday. A Party leader can affect the mood and general direction of their Party, but they can't be present in all of the groundwork. (Their presence in some of the groundwork would be nice.)

It's easy for me to try and pin the blame on a distant group. In truth, nobody wants to change their lifestyle. I've been indoctrinated by climate change science since I was in elementary school, and I don't even want to take shorter showers.

I visited the Gulf Cooperation Council pavilion, a large space done in red and white with gold trim. The GCC consists of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates--all of these countries are part of OPEC except for Bahrain and Oman, by the way. They had touchscreen tables (much larger than India's) displaying the latest eco-friendly tech; I watched a couple of informative videos on the work done by Saudi Aramco, a private Saudi Arabian oil company.

I was particularly interested in a prototype on-board carbon capture system for cars, mostly because it seemed pretty inefficient and expensive despite being based on some cool science. The video claimed that this device could be retrofitted onto any oil-based car. It did fail to mention some details--mainly, test results for the prototype and what a "small drop" in performance means. I grabbed my camera and started snapping pictures of the simplistic blueprints on the screen.

One of the attendants didn't like that very much.

I didn't get his name or country of origin for a couple of reasons: he was much shorter than me, so his badge wasn't in my line of sight, and I was too intimidated to remember to check.

"English?" He stared me up and down. Good guess.

"Yes," I said, and I tried to make a joke about knowing a little Spanish, too.

"You need 'Spañol? We have 'Spañol." He started motioning towards a different attendant, so I backpedaled.

I held up my hands. "English is fine, it's fine."

He nodded and launched into an aggressive explanation of the touchscreen's basic functions, such as how to start and pause a video. I tried to redirect him to the car prototype. Unfortunately, most of the pavilions' attendants aren't experts in any of the information in their displays. They're there to point and smile. When I asked for details, he started waving and called for a man across the room. "She needs more information on your cars!"

I'm regretting now that I didn't have a chance to go back and get this other man's name or home country. He must have worked for Saudi Aramco, or at least consulted with them, since he knew what I was talking about when I was asking if the capture system stores carbon as gas or supercritical fluid. (Both; once carbon accumulates to a certain level in the tank, the pressure is great enough for the carbon to stay in a supercritical state.) He said that the storage system wasn't on the market yet, but they were going to display a car in their gallery tomorrow.

I felt like a deer in headlights throughout the whole conversation. Clearly, this man was much more important and knowledgeable than me. I'm a high school student, and the attendant had shouted for his attention as if I was some important ambassador. I thanked him for his time and left pretty quickly for a different side event about offshore geological carbon sequestration. (Unfortunately, that's the short description.) An important note: don't ask those people if their technology is safe. They're tired of it. I didn't make that mistake, but a couple of doubtful questions during the panel had a Norwegian engineer about ready to rip his mustache off.

That event was fascinating, especially because the crowd was full of skeptics, and the panelists were kept on their toes. I might make an additional post about it later--for now, I have to run to that Korean presentation I mentioned on Day 1.