COP16

By Boyd Cohen, CEO CO2 IMPACT I spent several days in Cancun at COP16 last week. I was most struck by the number and diversity of businesses and business leaders who are on board. In fact, after engaging in the World Climate Summit and the Greener Solutions side event, I felt reinvigorated that business is [...]

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Boyd Cohen, Ph.D., CEO CO2 IMPACT “O muere el capitalismo, o muere la Madre Tierra,” Evo Morales proclaimed at the recent UN COP16 in Cancun, Mexico.  The position that either “capitalism dies, or mother earth dies,” is certainly shared by many around the globe. And with good reason.  It is hard to argue that capitalism [...]

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The Cancun Climate Summit (aka UNFCCC COP16) wrapped up this past weekend. Expectations were sufficiently low that the fact that they managed to reach an agreement could be considered a success, especially in the light of last year’s meltdown in Copenhagen. The process managed to eke out enough progress to justify its own future existence [...]

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By Jigar Shah, CEO Carbon War Room Every year there are globally 50 billion tons of manmade CO2 emitted into our atmosphere. By 2020 — that number is expected to reach 60 billion tons. As COP 15 showed us last year and COP 16 is currently demonstrating, governments around the world are simply not moving [...]

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The following is our second dispatch from COP16 in Cancun by Sean Kidney. Kidney works for the Climate Bonds Initiative, a group seeking to finance major climate projects thorough bonds. Kidney has been kind enough to share his notes with us. He offers the following from the last few days of activity…. As the Cancun [...]

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The odds that the COP16 talks in Cancun this week will produce much in the way of meaningful international agreement aren’t very high. Nonetheless, I was happy to get a dispatch from Sean Kidney via Hunter Lovins yesterday. Kidney works for the Climate Bonds Initiative, a group seeking to finance major climate projects thorough bonds. [...]

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By: Michel Gelobter A year ago, the world was hopeful that a global agreement would come out of the COP15 sessions in Copenhagen. With the United States joining the UN climate negotiations for the first time in almost a decade, all the players were at the table. Unfortunately, legislative gridlock ensued in the US and [...]

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As COP-16 begins in Cancun, Mexico, world leaders need to understand that global warming isn’t only about carbon dioxide. In a world that is stepping close to a steep and dangerous precipice, doing more to reduce non-CO2 climate change contributors such as methane, black carbon soot, tropospheric ozone, and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) might help head global [...]

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The UN sanctioned COP16 is just around the corner in Cancun, Mexico.  Will this year’s COP16 give us bona-fide treaty signed by governments across the planet?  Will it be another impasse as in past years?  Or perhaps something a little different?  There is a slightly different twist running parallel to treaty negotiations by governments.  This [...]

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At each of the last three climate summits, Canada has been deemed the world’s Colossal Fossil — the country that has done more to sabotage an international climate agreement than any other. After events yesterday, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that Canada will retain its title in 2010 at COP-16, and the world will pay [...]

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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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Originally published on Global Warming is Real The “Road to Cancun” moves haltingly forward with the conclusion last Friday of the United Nations climate talks in Bonn. According to a UN press release, the two-week negotiating session made “important progress towards concluding what was left incomplete at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in [...]

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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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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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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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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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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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