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 catastrophic climate change. While scientists generally agree that this would entail cutting 1990-level greenhouse-gas emissions by about 80% by 2050, there were no references to this numerical target in the text, only that ‘deep cuts’ will be made ‘according to science’.

Developed countries will not be subjected to legally binding targets. Rigorous international monitoring and measurement of emissions – something the United States insisted upon but China argued to be a compromise to their national sovereignty – will not be enforced, and countries will measure their own emissions and publish their results.

Perhaps the only significant agreement was on funding: there will be a $10bn per year prompt-start adaptation funding for the most vulnerable countries over 2010-12. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also made a breakthrough announcement on Thursday of the U.S. agreeing to contribute its share to a $100bn per year ‘Copenhagen Green Climate Fund’ by 2020.

This comes after 4 major reports, spanning more than 2 decades, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that established a scientific consensus of anthropogenic climate change as being ‘unequivocal’. This comes after two years of preparations since the Bali Action Plan was put into place. This comes as hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets demanding that political leaders strike an ambitious agreement commensurate with the climate challenges.

If this represented just a first step, one wonders how many more of these tedious, drawn-out steps will be necessary before world leaders can agree on something concrete and useful.

The two weeks of the summit were full of drama. The African Group walked out in protest, complaining that its interests were being sidelined by the Danish hosts. Delegates from the Small Island States continually sounded their desperate concerns about national survival. China and the United States – severely handicapped by a bill stalled in the Senate – lobbed piercing criticisms back and forth. Blame-shifting, finger-pointing and name-calling were the order of the day. Leaders did little more than repeatedly stating their pre-conference commitments, even while civil society movements were screaming their collective throats hoarse about the safety of the planet.

Amid the paralysis of the official ‘process’, one comes away wondering whether hopes of a global political agreement were dead on arrival: perhaps, as many had feared, we were placing far too much faith in the ability of people to reach across their differences to strike a deal. After all, combating climate change is an immensely costly process… right?

Right, but only up to a point. As this author has written about elsewhere, one of the key problem of the current debate about action against climate change is that people keep seeing it as a cost, not an opportunity. The transition to a low-carbon world is not ‘just’ about forking out trillions of dollars to reduce the odds of climate catastrophe at some point in the future; it is also fundamentally about entrepreneurial innovation and job creation. At a time when countries all around the world are struggling to escape the throes of recession, it is hard to conceive of a better plan to jolt economies back to life.

What we saw in Copenhagen was that people from different countries found it hard to agree. It is this author’s opinion that maybe they don’t have to agree: by recognizing the power of competitive markets, with the appropriate carbon price mechanisms, we can spark a clean-technology revolution where companies and countries actually compete to reduce emissions, instead of waiting for political leaders to take second and third and further ‘steps’ until they’re blue in the face while we boil ourselves in our own exhaust.

Behind the flaccid rhetoric of politicians in Copenhagen is one hard truth: many of their voters are either unaware or unconvinced of the ability of the low-carbon transition to generate income and employment. Granted, politicians are not able to credibly promise their electorates of these benefits. On the other hand, businesses – which are the entities that employ workers in the first place – have much more credibility in delivering that promise. As Lord Stern pointed out in a recent Financial Times op-ed, we need to hear more from business leaders:

‘Many in the business world have meanwhile recognised the innovative potential of low-carbon growth. Business must therefore speak up and show where the true global interest lies.’

Note: The opinions expressed here are those of the author’s alone, and do not represent the views of the institutions he works for.