COP15

There’s new meaning to being part of the climate change solution if MIT and the Climate CoLab online community can leverage their crowdsourcing contest into ideas that will shape an international climate agreement. Last year’s UN climate conference in Copenhagen produced little progress and lots of frustration on the environmental-climate change front and the upcoming [...]

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A new website launched this month by the United Nations, FastStartFinance.org, is designed to track climate change funding commitments from industrialized countries. The move is an attempt to make sure that developed economies will deliver on their plans to provide seed funds to help poorer nations battle climate change, as the next round of climate [...]

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By Joshua Wiese While gushing oil in the Gulf was foremost on the minds of family and friends in the States, my climate and energy interests sent me across the Atlantic to Bonn Germany, where two weeks of intense climate negotiations just wrapped. This was the second round of UN climate negotiations since Copenhagen, and [...]

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By Joshua Wiese The most profound difference between my experience here in Bonn and my experience at all the other negotiations I’ve attended in the last year is the massive downward shift in people’s ambition and sense of possibility. I find it difficult to understand how we’ve gone from an unrelenting and furious global push [...]

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By Joshua Wiese There’s a trickle of news coming out of yesterday’s opening meetings in the Bonn Climate Change Talks, the first since world leaders gathered in Copenhagen last December. I’m here tracking the US Delegation as part of the Adopt a Negotiator project, so I thought I’d add my reflections to the trickle. Friday [...]

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As the 40th anniversary of Earth Day approaches, Congress is heating up over debate around the proposed Kerry-Graham-Lieberman Bill, which would establish sweeping federal energy and climate legislation. As tensions rise, high-end escorts in the greater Capitol Beltway area have offered their services for free to any member of Congress who votes in favor of [...]

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By Dennis Salazar Copenhagen – A Microcosm of the Green Movement Last year’s disappointing climate summit in Copenhagen demonstrated if not proved two important things about “saving the earth”: 1. Sustainability is a very emotional topic for some 2. Sustainability is a financial topic for most Unfortunately, what transpired in Copenhagen is probably the rule, [...]

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A quick post today: KPMG has been no stranger to climate change issues and has offered some interesting commentary in the past, particularly during the COP15 conference in December. The following is a great COP15 wrap up conversation I though was worth sharing. It features Alan Buckle, KPMG’s Global Head of Advisory, and Barend van [...]

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Get the full text of the Copenhagen Accord (pdf – advance unedited version). This will be my last post under the banner “The Road to Copenhagen.” Much punditry, on this site and elsewhere, comes in the wake of the now-ended COP15 climate conference. I will likely not have much to add as I recover from [...]

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What does the Copenhagen Communique mean to an entrepreneur? Am I being too blunt to suggest the answer is “nothing?” Entrepreneurs are focused on their customers as the source of inspiration and profits. Laws passed by politicians receive entrepreneurial attention only when they impact their customers’ ability to buy or their cost of operations. The [...]

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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on Grist, and is re-posted with permission. By Amanda Little, Grist’s former Muckraker columnist Hours before the outcome of the Copenhagen conference was revealed, I sat down with New York Times Columnist Thomas Friedman to discuss the implications of the historic summit. No matter what happens in Copenhagen, [...]

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By Lee Barken, IT practice leader at Haskell & White, LLP It’s a balmy 67 degrees in San Diego and I’m back home at my local coffee shop, sipping Chai Tea Latte.  A short 24 hours ago, I was in the snow and bitter cold of Copenhagen, Denmark, attending the 15th meeting of the Conference [...]

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ClimateWorks is a non-profit network of policy and technical experts working with governments to reduce carbon emissions without compromising economic vitality. The group’s focus is on the big sectors and regions where most emissions originate. Naturally, a big target is China. Matt Lewis of ClimateWorks was recently in China producing a series of videos showing [...]

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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on Grist, and is re-posted with permission. By Amanda Little, Grist’s former Muckraker columnist When you think of renewable energy, the image that comes to mind is often a solar array in California, a windmill in Texas, or a cornfield in Iowa. Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle (D) wants [...]

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By Lee Barken, IT practice leader at Haskell & White, LLP With the gathering of more than 130 world leaders in Copenhagen this week, the issue of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is taking center stage.  GHG has become the burden that no one country can unilaterally cure, but every person on the planet has a [...]

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By Eban Goodstein, Director of The Bard Center for Environmental Policy Copenhagen, at an extraordinary confluence in human history. Amidst grey skies, wet snow, bureaucratic chaos, street protests, and warm Danish hospitality, delegates and observers share an understanding. The outcome of these meetings will profoundly impact every human being who will ever walk the face [...]

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During the second week of COP15, it seems very appropriate, not to mention timely, to discuss all things carbon. Let’s start off with a basic fact: There is more than one type of carbon. Keep reading to find out about the rainbow of carbon ‘colors.’ First, we will look at good ole basic black carbon, [...]

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An Irish bookie is taking bets on just how much CO2 the planet will belch out next year, and let’s just say the odds are not in humanity’s favor. Paddy Power, an online and offline gambling company based in Dublin, said the odds are 7 to 4 that total world output of CO2 will be [...]

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This afternoon (Copenhagen time), California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger praised the efforts of the scientist, entrepreneur, capitalist, innovator, and activist as the fundamental source of change on climate. As important as they are, Schwarzenegger said, national agreements “will never do enough.”  Real progress comes at the sub-national level – the “iconoclast and individual citizen.”   Recalling that [...]

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By Eban Goodstein, Director of The Bard Center for Environmental Policy – join Dir Goodstein on The National Climate Seminar call where he will be reporting live from COP 15 tomorrow! As COP 15 enters its final days, among the tens of thousands of international negotiators, climate activists, and green business entrepreneurs, hopes have been [...]

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So you think you’re burned out on COP15… I’ve got a confession to make. I’m tired. I’m tired of the posturing, of the chanting, of the myriad ways the same issues can be endlessly bandied about. Rich vs. poor, north vs. south, 1.5 degrees vs. 2 degrees, who pays, who’s responsible, talk of “real deals,” [...]

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By Lee Barken, IT practice leader at Haskell & White, LLP Up the road from the COP15 Climate Conference and just outside of downtown Copenhagen, 170 exhibitors gathered this weekend for the 2-day Bright Green conference, to demonstrate that climate change is both a dangerous peril and a pathway to profits. Bright Green, a showcase [...]

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Cisco Systems bills itself as the leader in “networked sustainability,” and organizers, knowing teleconferencing would be an important element at the COP15 events, launched a public tender for sponsors for our videoconferencing. Naturally, Cisco stepped in. Cisco’s Telepresence, the technology used for virtual meetings at COP15, is described on Cisco’s website as high quality audio, [...]

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Don’t get me wrong, I am watching as eagerly as the rest of you. I’m thrilled that COP15 has garnered as much media attention as it has. It’s amazing. I don’t think that the consciousness of the world has ever been so fixated on a single environmental issue in my lifetime. It’s everything that I [...]

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The talk in the halls of the Bella Center this afternoon revolved around the so-called “leaked text” of  papers presented in plenary sessions by the chairs of both working groups (AWG-KP and AWG-LCA) that broadly outline the current “state of play” in COP15 negotiations, as UNFCCC executive secretary Yvo de Boer characterized it at today’s [...]

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Not to be too outdone by their COP 15 colleagues grabbing the world’s attention this week in Copenhagen, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization moved on a couple of climate change and food security fronts, including the launch of a multi-donor program to support sustainable, low-emission agriculture practices in developing nations. FAO announced that [...]

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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on Grist, and is posted with permission. By Jonathan Hiskes There is numbingly little news coming out of most of the 20 or so daily press briefings at the Copenhagen climate talks. Officials from national delegations and research, policy, and trade groups seem to use them to restate [...]

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A new poll released today (PDF) demonstrates that over 60 percent of Americans recognize that the earth is getting warmer mostly because of human activity such as burning fossil fuels. The poll, conducted by The McClatchy Company, the third-largest newspaper company in the United States, and Ipsos Public Affairs, found that a slight majority of [...]

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In concert with the opening of the COP15 climate talks here in Copenhagen, the EPA finalized their endangerment finding on Monday that specifies carbon emissions as a threat to human health and well being (see Bill DiBenedetto’s  detailed post from yesterday). At yesterday’s press briefing UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer was asked what influence the [...]

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More than 20 years ago, David Wirth, at the time a senior attorney at the NRDC, wrote about the imperative of climate protection in global politics. “The international community cannot afford to delay elevating the greenhouse effect to the top of the foreign-policy agenda,” Wirth wrote in Foreign Policy. The editor’s note of Endgame, the [...]

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