Cycling in Delhi, India, is a game of chicken, swerving to dodge all manner of vehicles and cows — yes cows — moving in unpredictable directions, too often directly at me. Admittedly, I sometimes forget which side of the road to ride on, but clearly I’m not the only one.

With my long Indian salvar camise dress and scarf blowing behind me and my helmet fastened tight, I buzz through the traffic like an anarchist on speed. I’m on my twenty-four-speed hybrid bicycle, occasionally nicking vehicles but judiciously avoiding the holy bovines and the colourfully clad people skillfully weaving their way through the mass of belching and bleeping traffic.

To my surprise I’m enjoying the chaos. I laugh aloud at the sheer thrill.

The diesel-thick, black haze that obscures both sun and stars, though, has me hacking and yearning for Toronto’s smog soup.

I make it to the Climate Justice Summit, a rally of Indian NGOs (non-governmental organizations), in one piece and feeling triumphant. I’m in awe to see some 5000 labour reps, environmentalists, displaced people and working poor marching, chanting, dancing and drumming their fervour for climate justice.

The people here are bound for a demonstration outside the United Nations meeting of governments — cumbersomely called the Eighth Session of the Conference of the Parties (or, the easier, COP 8), just a few miles away. There, the world’s ministers and bureaucrats of the environment are assembled to discuss the growing threat of climate change.

Clearly the new movement, coined Climate Justice and motivated largely by the least industrialized countries, is in full force here in India. It is the poor and the marginalized who are and will continue to be most affected by the impacts of climate change. “The biggest injustice of climate change is that the hardest hit communities are the least responsible for creating the problem,” writes Rita Nahata for the India Climate Justice Forum.

The rising number of extreme weather events such as floods, droughts and storms are already more pronounced in tropical and sub-tropical countries, where people live a precarious existence, lacking food and shelter and without the protection of insurance and government safety nets. Yet their ecological footprint is but a fraction of ours.

This ecological debt of the North to the South continues to grow, despite our awareness of the impacts, and southern countries are rightly demanding compensation as well as their fair share to a clean atmosphere.

At stake is how this translates into more precise climate change lingo by world bodies addressing the issue. They begin calculations with a lifetime per capita allotment of greenhouse gas emissions that they estimate the earth can sustain over a period of time. By those calculations, western countries would have to reduce per capita emissions substantially, while less industrialized nations would be allowed to slightly increase them.

“Everybody’s got to have a right to equal entitlement of the atmosphere. It’s a global commons,” says Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation. “There’s a growing political lobby for such equity within European governments and even industry, lead by the insurance industry.”

The rally progresses but is blocked by the police, preventing us from getting to COP 8. So I head off on my own to negotiate the obstacle course.

Although each of four people I ask for directions gives me a different answer, I eventually find my way to the U.N. meeting charged with moving the Kyoto Protocol forward to observe. My expectations aren’t high. As Kate Hampton of Friends of the Earth International says, “Kyoto is stuck in technocratize, forgetting the original principles as set out at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.”

John Byrne of the Centre for Energy and Environmental Policy tells me “these discussions are less an ecological debate than an economic debate. What’s really going on is the commodification of the atmosphere, where the transition to a low-carbon future is seen to be best handled in the global marketplace.” This is discouraging — we all know how the poor fare in the global marketplace.

And what of Canada’s role? Well, we’ve scored high in the Fossil of the Day awards given out by activists for “opponents to climate protection.” We’re third behind Saudi Arabia and the United States for our dogged attempts to get credit for exporting natural gas while not being penalized for exporting dirtier energy, for proposing that large monoculture plantations be considered enviro-cleansing sinks, for trying to weaken the requirements of industrial countries to report progress, for preventing input on sinks from the NGO community, for using stall tactics, and more.

But it’s not all doom coming from the Canadian contingent. Alex Boston of the David Suzuki Foundation gives Canada the thumbs up for fully supporting a proposal from the European Union that emphasized emissions equity as well as radical emission reductions (more than fifty per cent) based on science rather than the marketplace, an extremely progressive position.

Of course, whether Delhi’s COP 8 succeeded or failed isn’t what matters to the people at the rally. Even meeting the Kyoto Protocol, with its targets and timetables, will yield virtually no improvement in their lives — by all calculations any benefits of reductions won’t show for almost two decades at best.

Slight emission reductions won’t prevent the inevitable climate change impacts that will make things for the world’s poor far, far worse, as their access to energy, water and social protection dwindles.

But walk they did, for climate justice, for their children and their children’s children. And, for us.

The greatest tragedy of all is that most of us are still not walking with them.

The Delhi meeting is a product of the only international legal instrument the world has — the Kyoto Protocol — to engage countries in greenhouse reduction strategies that are so needed now. Loopholes and province-driven campaigns notwithstanding, majority support in the Canadian parliament and amongst the general public for ratification of Kyoto has me hopeful.

And when Canada signs on, bicycle bells around the world will be clanging in celebration.