Thom Yorke gets into the Copenhagen climate summit on a press pass

Thom Yorke got into the UN climate conference in Copenhagen as a member of the press on Thursday afternoon, the summit's second-to-last day, and stayed to the end. He came with Tony Juniper, the former head of Friends of the Earth, with whom he campaigned for Britain's climate change bill. Yorke says he has a framed copy of the act on his wall at home.

He decided to come at the last moment, he told Eric Brücher Camara of BBC Brasil, to keep some hope after watching the negotiations stall. The American delegation had angered him on Wednesday, when he posted on Dead Air Space, the band's blog, that they were arguing for the treaty's “shall” to become “should” while there were near-riots outside.

Inside the Bella Center on Thursday he told a camera crew he doubted he would have got in any other way, and wondered how long it would be before he was thrown out. It's a lot of uptight, middle-aged men doing the negotiations that need to see through their particular little spheres of self-interest and look at the bigger picture.¹ That day the organisers let in only a few representatives of the main campaign groups. Yorke wrote that throwing them out was a disgrace. He told BBC Brasil that keeping them outside made it easy to dress the talks up as green.

On Friday he posted from inside all day. He sat in on a British press briefing by Ed Miliband, the climate secretary. He watched Barack Obama walk past looking grim after talks with the Chinese, and heard that Brazil and some Latin American countries had walked out. this is all starting to really feel like some enormous vaguely pointless corporate expo.⁷ i take to bbc radio 1 and am asked 'yeah but is climate change really real' etc etc. oh for gods sake.⁷

Today, as the summit ended, he wrote that he was disgusted at how it had finished. There was no international agreement, he wrote, and whatever deal the papers reported tomorrow would be nothing like what was needed. i feel deeply traumatized by the whole experience. if you'd been there you would also have been.⁹