Your business and Copenhagen
With the start of the United Nations Climate Change Conference about to kick off in Copenhagen for the next two weeks (7-18 Dec), it was bound to happen wasn’t it? An allegedly underreported item by the BBC has become a little bigger after viewer complaints (a lá the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand ‘scandal’).
The Climate Reporting Unit (CRU), based at the University of East Anglia (UEA) has had a bunch emails stolen. Now, whilst this story should be filed along with all the other public sector data loss debacle stories, the focus has been sharpened on the content of these e-mails; namely that the data, which is fed, on behalf of the UK, to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), shows that there has been a marginal decline in mean temperatures over the UK, supposedly throwing all the arguments for action on climate change out with the bathwater and the baby!
For those of us not wholly consumed with the need to get the latest Wii for Christmas, this is rather missing the point, isn’t it? It has never been disputed that we did not start climate change; what has been established with scientific data is that we are accelerating the rate at which the planet is heading towards the next swing of the pendulum. What has been clearly established is that the mean temperature over areas of high industrial activity (mostly the developed western world) has risen disproportionately over the past 30-40 years.
The real issue with climate change is the way in which all nations work together as we go deeper into the 21st century, and this is what Copenhagen is really about. The developed nations have a raft of planned or actual measures to start the process of carbon emission reduction in preparation for a low carbon economy; what is not in place is a mechanism to allow the developing world to be as carbon conscious as we are starting to become. This requires co-operation and funding is part of what Copenhagen is all about.
Also, we are running out carbon fuels. Irrespective of what happens with climate change (though the effects are ignored at your peril), we need collectively to be supporting the implementation of clean tech as a mechanism for ensuring future economic stability and growth. The reality is that many of the parts of the world that we currently exploit for cheap labour (and so goods and services) will be precisely those that are best placed to generate clean energy.
It would be foolhardy not to consider these developing nations in any plans that come out of the next two weeks.
It would be even more foolhardy to try to subvert the effectiveness of the Conference with the red herring of disputed figures about climate change rates.
Climate is a non-human dependent reality and energy poverty is the issue that the business community should be more concerned about.
There will doubtless placard waving extremists from both sides of the argument closing in from around the world over the next two weeks, all eager to air their opinions about the state of the planet… leave them to it and start to work out ways (if you have not already done so) of how your organisation can be less carbon energy dependent.
