Citola Blog
Gobfests And Gradualism
When a commercial management team runs out of ideas, it typically calls in expensive management consultants. And when the consultants run out of ideas, they have been known to advise, in their own inimitable management-speak, that the company be run along the lines of incremental gradualism. At Citola, we have a name for this: it’s called making it up as you go along.
Which brings us neatly, if rather unfortunately, to the United Nations and international attempts to extend the Kyoto Protocol beyond its scheduled expiration date in 2012. As things stand, the Clean Development Mechanism, the world’s second-biggest carbon market, is at risk. In the absence of a new agreement, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is attempting to buy some time. With a meeting scheduled in Tianjiin in China in October, there are frantic behind-the-scenes attempts to plug the gap that the Kyoto agreement threatens to leave behind it.
The personal and the political collide with the international here, as the next COP climate change convention, scheduled for November in Cancun, Mexico, may provoke a real storm of protest – should it prove as ineffective as last year’s festival of pointless gesturing in Copenhagen.
So we extend a cautious welcome to the moves made unilaterally by individual governments. The Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, recently used the picturesque term “gobfest” when describing high-level climate negotiations. Now she has unveiled an initiative that at least looks like a move in the right direction.
The new move is an attempt to allow foresters and farmers to create carbon offsets for sale into international markets. This would be a good step forward by giving Australian carbon offsets access to international carbon standards and markets. To publicise the policy, Gillard recently visited a farm and made the most of the photo opportunity with a few farmyard animals – as though there weren’t enough of those in politics anyway!
Seriously, we like the look of the proposals. But we await concrete progress with bated, somewhat sceptical breath. We want initiatives like this to work – but we’re all too aware of the incremental gradualist factor...
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