Citola Blog
COP15 Grinds Into Gear
The long-awaited COP15 conference has kicked off at last. Here’s the blow-by-blow action if you want to monitor events as they happen.
Some have been waiting for the Copenhagen climate-change event more eagerly than others. A UK newspaper, The Guardian, is patting itself on the back somewhat for its efforts in co-ordinating a joint editorial. This is a short piece of polemic that will be published by fifty six newspapers in twenty languages around the world tomorrow. Broadly speaking the loose coalition of print organs is to the left of the political spectrum in most countries (Liberation and La Repubblica are very much the platforms for socialist thought in France and Italy, for example).
On the whole, the editorial does a good job of pointing out to the politicians that they have a real responsibility, and that the people of the world are watching them and requiring them to deliver.
Of course, if you trawl online for a few comments it’s very easy to find plenty of people who argue that journalists and commentators are part of an industrial-political conspiracy against the ordinary people of this world and indeed the planet itself.
It’s true that the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) will be present and arguing its case at the conference. But simply because some big companies – oil corporations, industrial giants, major law firms – are there does not detract from the value of COP15.
We detest and decry pollution – that’s why we have a radical carbon outcome as well as a carbon credit offering here at Citoal. We address the problem directly through our re-forestation programme. So while we loathe pollution and polluters, we think that the presence of big business is a good thing. IETA’s stated intentions certainly seem pretty noble.
As we’ve said before, business has to be included in the drive to meet climate-change challenges. Business people have some of the greatest drive and practical creativity around today. And we believe that some of them really do care. Those who don’t, see that it’s in their best business interests to develop sustainable business models.
Like the rest of the world, we are awaiting developments with keen interest.
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