Friday, 7 December, 5 p.m. — Tackling climate change starts at home, at least for 128,000 children who have made it their business to convince their parents to leave the car at home and let them walk or cycle to school. The goal of the ambitious project, known as ZOOM, was to collect green footprints — one for each trip made to school by clean or green transport — and present them at the Bali Conference.

The children, mostly in Europe, aimed to gather the footprints equivalent to 20 times around the globe. As it turned out, the group, represented by a designated class of children in Bali, presented the chief of the Climate Change Convention, Yvo de Boer, with a certificate worth 1,457,039 green footprints, enough to circumnavigate the world 80 times over. Ulrike Janssen, who led the effort, says "little steps can lead to big results."

Friday, 7 December, 4 p.m. — It's Friday in Bali and there is a sense that the negotiations are on course although there are serious issues that will be have to be addressed in the coming week. The machinery of the negotiations is up and running and the goal is to find as much agreement as possible before the ministerial meeting begins next Wednesday.

NGOs in Bali, usually critical of the progress of negotiations, admitted that there had been some progress and that some major emitters had advanced genuinely positive and creative positions. Other countries, they said, had not been so constructive.

But the NGOs most concerned with deforestation issues maintained that countries did not seem to sense the urgency of the issue. "There is the real world and the convention world," said Brazilian NGO Marcelo Furtado. The problem in the deforestation issue, he said, is that "the developed countries are looking for cheap carbon credits and the developing countries are looking for quick cash. This perverse relationship holds the forests as hostages."

Friday, 7 December, 3:30 p.m. — Louis Palmer set off from Lucerne, Switzerland, for Bali in a completely solar powered vehicle on 3 July. He has logged13,500 kilometres through Europe, the Middle East and India; and during the entire trip, the vehicle emitted no greenhouse gases and produced virtually no noise.

"All over the world people love the solar taxi," Palmer says, "There has not been one negative reaction and I have heard no doubts about global warming." The taxi was constructed with the assistance of several Swiss universities and the company Q-Cell. The UN Environment Programme, and Switzerland, are partners in promoting his trip, which will continue on to the Americas and Africa before returning to Europe.

The taxi reaches speeds of 90 km an hour and can run for 300 kilometers without sunshine and 400 when the sun is out. The cost of producing the taxi was steep, Palmer says, "about the price of two Ferraris." But that cost would come down a lot, he adds, if the taxi is mass produced.

Friday, 7 December, 10:30 a.m. — Much to the dismay of people who are busy implementing the Kyoto Protocol, there is a steady stream of reports citing that the Protocol will expire in 2012. In fact, 2012 simply marks the end of the period during which industrialized countries have to reduce their emissions by certain amounts. But the Protocol, which has established several new mechanisms to promote green investment in developing countries and has helped to spawn a carbon market in Europe, will continue. The reason a new agreement is sought for post-2012 is to make sure there are no gaps in emission reduction efforts and to assure carbon markets that there will be stability.