climate change

Okay, I'll admit: The headline above is a bit of a come-on. I couldn't possibly do justice to the past 10 years' worth of green business activity — at least not in the following 1,500 or so words. But as we view the whatever-it's-called decade in the rearview mirror, it's tempting to assess what's transpired since the good old days of Y2K to see how far we've come — and how far we haven't. So, let's do that.

I've been trying over the past few days to find some Hopenhagen in Copenhagen — that is, to see some positive outcome to the COP15 climate summit just concluded. The two-week event ended with a whimper, not a bang, a not-altogether-surprising conclusion to an overhyped event in which all parties had anticipating the entire world coming together to solve a single, critical issue affecting — well, the entire world.

In part I, I made the general case for cap and trade as an unserious policy framework that inserts extraneous elements into pricing carbon that threaten the whole enterprise. I generated general definitions of seriousness and unseriousness and applied them to cap and trade and its market mechanisms.

Saturday night brought one of the plum events of Copenhagen, at least for the business crowd assembled in this city: a conference held at Kronborg, also known as Hamlet's Castle, in Elsinore, about 50 kilometers from Copenhagen's city centre. The 250 or so well-coiffed business executives who made the trek here did so in large part by the efforts of Danish media magnate Erik Rasmussen, a Michael Bloomberg sort whose business publication, Monday Morning, is the hub of a influential think tank that has placed Rasmussen at the center of the Danish business world.

In a few days in Copenhagen, world leaders will debate and, we hope, agree upon aggressive targets for humanity’s greatest challenge to date: to avert devastating man-made climate change by transforming our economies’ use of energy and of land while maintaining and improving social welfare for the world’s peoples. We have in the past 250 years proceeded on a course of development which has used fossil energy to replace human and animal muscle power with mechanical energy. 

Friday was dubbed "Business Day" here in Copenhagen — a chance for the corporate community to come together to discuss their considerable role in addressing climate change.

Significantly, business has been all but shut out of the discussions taking place a few kilometers away at the Bella Center, the site of the official UN COP15 negotiations. There, governments from around the world are talking about a slew of critical issues surrounding the commitments the everyone hopes will emerge a week from today from the global community on climate mitigation and adaptation.

To start with the basics: I don't expect this week's United Nations Climate Change Summit, a.k.a. COP15, to produce much from the perspective of global political change. I'm guessing, cynically perhaps, that the two-week event will yield more posturing and pageantry than productive policies.

Our world these days seems to be a succession of forks in the road, points at which decisions need to be made about which pathway we collectively must take. In nearly every case, there's an unsustainable "business as usual" scenario (often shortened, unappealingly, to BAU) along with one or more alternatives.

Do people care about the climate?

It's an open question these days, and opinion polls offer little help. Some show that climate ranks fairly low among public concerns, while others indicate a high level of concern among the populace. And in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate summit, now a mere six weeks away, those opinions count for something, particularly in the United States, where lawmakers are looking to be swayed one way or another.