Last Friday morning, I stepped off the plane in Copenhagen for the 15th Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP15). My role at the Copenhagen climate conference is as a policy mentor and coach to 12 youth delegates from 7 Midwest states. They make up Expedition Copenhagen, traveling with polar explorer and global warming eyewitness Will Steger.  I had reviewed all the negotiating positions of individual countries like my own, China, Japan, Canada--and important blocks of countries, the European Union, the Alliance of Small States, the G-77 developing nations. I felt prepared to track the formal negotiations of the conference. What I was unprepared for was the remarkable intensity and focus of the youth delegates I would meet that night.

Among the official delegates at the United Nations-sponsored conference are more than 2,000 young people from at least 100 countries who are feverishly working to influence the world they are inheriting. Youth organizations held their own conference the previous weekend to build solidarity and infrastructure for decision making and action by youth groups from both developing and industrialized nations. That Friday, the Washington  Post carried the story, and quoted one of the youth delegates who I would be working with. She would receive her college degree on the following day.

"You really have a lot of power," said Danielle Ostafinski, a senior at Grand Valley State University who is representing Michigan as part of a delegation funded by the Minneapolis-based Will Steger Foundation and led by the polar explorer.

Ostafinski and the other delegates wore orange T-shirts that read, "How old will you be in 2050?" Scores of young people stood outside the conference center in the frigid Copenhagen weather Thursday wearing the shirts, she said. "The message we wanted to send was, 'Do not leave youth out in the cold,' " she said. "It's our future on the line."

The Web conference between Steger delegates and Washington area students was one of many events scheduled for the two-week conference. It was arranged by the U.S. Forest Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which have created related Web materials for schools.

That same night I arrived, the 18-person Will Steger Foundation delegation met to assess the end of their first full week of Copenhagen climate change negotiations and civic action. They had been working 16 to 20 hour days for nearly a week, and there were signs of exhaustion. Key strategies were decided for having an even better outcome the following week: how to support each other and each be responsible for her or his own health; how to overcome communications handicaps of no cell phone and poor wifi internet access at everywhere in Copenhagen except in their housing and at the official event; how to better deploy our resources to choose among the dozens of events every hour; how to better use our team of two videographers and our relationship with The Uptake, a Minnesota nonprofit, live streaming from Copenhagen.

As I started to learn about each of the delegates, I could see that Danielle was spot on. They really do have a lot of power! They were generating lots of media stories in their home towns and in national news. Events they had planned were being streamed live via the web on new media channels like The Uptake. Within our delegation, members had already had face-to-face meetings with Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the U.S. EPA, Gary Locke, secretary of Commerce for the Obama Administration, and Todd Stern and Jonathan Pershing, the lead U.S. negotiator and his deputy. One delegate was in negotiations with senior policy official in the U.S. Department of Energy about how the official text of the Copenhagen treaty would treat transfer of U.S. technology to developing nations.

Still....I was not prepared at all for my second day! Saturday, everyone took a break from official activities and engaged in the largest demonstration ever in favor of urgent action on climate change. More on that in my next blog posting.

You can see my Twitter stream from Copenhagen even if you don't use Twitter here: http://twitter.com/NobleFreshEnerg.