A View from the Bus

From The Economist,

This column, emblematically, comes to you from a bus. In the annals of UN climate diplomacy, the Cancún meeting—the 16th conference of the parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is also the 6th meeting of the parties to the Kyoto protocol—will be remembered, more succinctly, as the conference of the buses. To all but a few, they are the inescapable essence of the Cancún experience.

This particular bus is headed from the Moon Palace to the Cancún Messe, a journey of about 20 minutes. The Moon Palace, a vast resort on the Gulf coast some way to the south of both Cancún proper and its separate hotel zone, is hosting the negotiations. It is large enough that it itself requires internal shuttle buses to connect its various parts, such as the halls where negotiations are taking place with those in which the journalists would be sequestered. Would be, because journalists want to be where the action is. The isolated press centre is largely deserted; the few in the press room are as likely as not filing pieces about how empty it is, or indeed interviewing each other on the subject.

The Moon Palace also contains the offices for the delegations to the conference, and many of the delegates themselves in some 2000 suites. It has a multiplicity of swimming pools and other attractions, lawns, palms and lazy iguanas. It probably looks a lot less like a car park with set dressing by someone who couldn’t get a job at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas when these various attractions are being enjoyed by a throng of happy honeymooners, as they are intended to be. At the moment they are mostly empty. Whether the same is true of the jacuzzis provided in every suite, who can say. Those in suites your correspondent has visited on business are being treated as embarrassments, but the press is not always present. (Full disclosure: some journalists, including this one, have simply through the nature of the accommodation Cancún has to offer been forced to accept jacuzzis of our own.)

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