Solar Generation

By Lisa Reichmann, SG delegate from Germany

Today was a really busy day- the first day of the IPCC Meeting in Bangkok; Thailand.
We met Dr. Patchauri, the chairman of the panel in front of the United Nations conference building before he went inside for the opening session. Since the solutions for climate change presented by the IPCC will have a big influence on the decisions to be made by politicians all over the world, we were rather proud that he followed our invitation.
He met us at the “Solar Generation future carrier”, a container on which we demonstrate how renewable energies are working. Since we have representatives from 7 countries here (from developing and from industrialized countries), everyone of them gave a short statement and afterwards Dr. Patchauri took action by symbolically reducing the amount of greenhouse gases at our thermometer. Unfortunately, he only thanked us for our commitment but did not mention how he is going to behave during the next days. We will watch him, carefully and since we gave him a pen with a windmill on it he will hopefully remember our presence and our demands...
After having taken this first step, we informed the world press and the thai public about our demands in a very loud and colorful action.

After lunch, we went to meet the thai minister for energy. He plans to build nuclear power plants in Thailand because, as he puts it, they are a solution for climate change.
Since nuclear power plants are unsafe and nobody knows where to store the radioactive waste, we do not consider it as a solution but as a serious problem. We had a long and energetic discussion with the minister and were really angry when he wanted us to be the “nuclear generation” and tried to corrupt us with presents. Sorry Sir, we do not give up that easily!!!

I think we had great activities today and there is a lot more to come during the next days:
The international SolarGeneration is working hard in Asia right now and we will keep you updated on our activities...