COP15

Today marks the start of UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, or COP15 as it’s widely known. A culmination of years of planning, months of lobbying by pressure groups such as those coordinated by TckTckTck. There’s a lot of anticipation and speculation as to what’s going to happen. Not all of it optimistic. While the [...]

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In case you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve no doubt been aware of a fiasco which emerged in the last few weeks from the University of East Anglia in the UK concerning unprofessional bickering between climate scientists exposed by an apparent email hacker. The FOXNews crowd is calling it proof that climate change (at [...]

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If the Copenhagen climate conference has managed to do anything (even before it begins), it has managed to divide. It has facilitated the formation of two neatly antithetical groups of people: those who think nothing will result, and those who are hopeful as to what could happen. “See You in Copenhagen” is a campaign of [...]

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If it’s all about the money, and it usually is, then the future financial landscape for cleantech development hinges on the outcome of the Copenhagen climate change conference as essentially as the meeting’s long-term impacts on environmental policy. There will be impacts whether or not binding and comprehensive agreements on emission reductions are cobbled in [...]

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They’re at it again – the creative team who brought you the wildly popular Story of Stuff are following up with “The Story of Cap and Trade: Why You Can’t Solve a Problem With the Thinking That Created It.” Building on the momentum of The Story of Stuff (over 8 million views to date) Annie [...]

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Just in time for the opening of the United National Climate Change conference in Copenhagen next week, the London-based medical journal The Lancet has published the findings of a number of studies that examine the links between climate change and public health. There are six separate reports in the series. They explore the public health [...]

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With little more than a week to go before the start of the COP15 climate change conference in Copenhagen, the “Road to Copenhagen” starts to sound a little tired, even as participants prepare for actually heading to Copenhagen. With the roller-coaster-like ride of pre-COP15 news, reeling from despair to faint glimmers of hope* that something [...]

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Rainforest degradation is the third largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and robs one billion of the poorest people on Earth from their source of livelihood. These are just two of myriad reasons that the world leaders meeting next month at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen must achieve some type of [...]

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The White House officially announced today that President Barack Obama will go to Copenhagen to attend the COP15 climate conference, a commitment Obama has thus far been reticent to make, saying that he would attend only if his presence would help secure a successful outcome in the climate negotiations. It now appears as if he [...]

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In the grand scheme of things, if neither next month’s Copenhagen summit on climate change or pending U.S. legislation on the same topic fails to establish firm, enforceable consensus on carbon reductions, accounting and reporting, it may not matter very much. That’s because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has already done most of the heavy [...]

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“Climate change and climate policy in Europe and the U.S. – Opportunities and Challenges in the Run-up to the Copenhagen Summit and beyond” Thus was billed a recent conference I attended last week at the Aspen Wye River Conference center located in rural Maryland along the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. The two-day conference [...]

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“The world is looking to the United States for measurable, verifiable action,” the New York Times’ Andrew Revkin declared on November 4 while speaking at the Bard Center for Environmental Policy’s National Climate Seminar. Revkin is not optimistic that Congress will pass a bill reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions before Copenhagen. The House passed a [...]

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If you follow environmental issues, chances are you’ve come across the beautiful, inspiring Hopenhagen campaign. The purpose of the campaign is to draw attention to the upcoming United Nations climate change conference COP15, which you can read more about here. Many folks who care deeply about climate change are watching closely with their fingers crossed, [...]

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As the last round of “intersessional” climate talks before Copenhagen opened on Monday in Barcelona, all eyes were looking in the same direction they were when we left Bangkok three weeks earlier: at the United States. Without American numbers on mitigation (or emissions reductions) and finance (for developing nations to build their own clean energy [...]

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The days grow short and with it the time left to lay a foundation that leads to an international climate treaty to which all nations – rich and poor, north and south – can agree. As Copenhagen braces for an influx of delegates, press, policy experts, and leaders from all corners of the globe this [...]

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About 53 days until COP15, and the word compromise is surfacing more and more in discussions around reaching an agreement in December. There is also worry that the U.S. will not have passed any sort of significant climate bill by then, thus hampering their ability to make any real CO2 emissions pledge. In a joint [...]

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This Thursday, October 15th, marks the third annual Blog Action Day.  The yearly event unites bloggers from around the world to discuss a single issue of global importance. In anticipation of the upcoming international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, this year’s discussion will focus on the very global topic of climate change. Over 5000 blogs are [...]

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In a statement released at the conclusion of the two-week session of climate talks in Bangkok, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer talked of more clarity on the “bricks and mortar” of the agreed outcome in Copenhagen, but that “long-held differences” persist on coming to terms on mid-term targets and finance. “A will has emerged [...]

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The “Road to Copenhagen” began on the Indonesian island of Bali at the COP13 climate conference in December of 2007. COP13 charted the intended course toward  Copenhagen, producing the Bali Roadmap (pdf) and the Bali Action Plan, setting forth the negotiating process designed to take the international community “beyond Kyoto” and produce an effective global response [...]

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