COP15 concludes. The climate deadlock doesn’t.

President Obama called the Copenhagen Accord – as the outcome of the two-week climate summit in the Danish capital came to be known as – ‘an important first step’. Essentially, the Copenhagen Accord is a 12-paragraph document outlining an agreement that the global average temperature increase must be kept to below 2degrees Celsius to avoid [...]

COP15 Halftime Report – Inequity Concerns Take Centre Stage

And so it began: the countdown timer at the United Nations Framework for Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC) website struck 0. On Monday December 7th, COP15 President Connie Hedegaard declared: ‘Time is up! We have had enough wake-up calls. And we have hit the snooze button one time too many. We can make Copenhagen that turning [...]

COP15: It makes sense to mitigate, even if you’re skeptical

The 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) is happening this week, from Monday Dec 7th to Friday Dec 18th. Lord Nick Stern of the LSE has rightly called COP15 ‘the most important international gathering since the Second World War’. Having been involved in Nick’s work for about a year now, I hope to bring to your [...]

Our low-carbon future – think opportunities, not costs

If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Herbert Stein (1916 – 1999) The quote above, often referred to as Stein’s Law, is in my view especially appropriate in describing the situation we now face with climate change. The scientific community tells us that climate change, left unchecked, could potentially result in catastrophic consequences [...]