Day 9: Report from Reed Smith Delegates in Copenhagen at the United Nations Climate Change Conference
This post was written by Larry Demase.
It’s time to add a corollary to our earlier statement that it’s not just what you know and who you know but what you are called. Our corollary is that it’s also what kind of credentials you have. The Bella Centre was a mob scene this morning and it turned away thousands of registrants. Still, for the 20,000 registrants who didn’t get in, it’s hard to say what they missed.
The high level negotiations between countries have reached a critical point with various alliances being formed on a number of issues. Nonetheless, the possibility of a broad based agreement may be fading. Of course, things may change but the Kyoto Protocol parties (along with the United States) are likely to leave with an agreement to finish their work either at a June meeting or at the next annual U.N. conference in late 2010 in Mexico City.
But that doesn’t mean that things outside of the Bella Centre are not productive. In addition to the high level talks there are a number of important and informative side meetings going on here. For example, the International Emissions Trading Association alone has brought together panels on 105 different topics ranging from the September 2009 agreement of the G-20 leaders in Pittsburgh “to phase out subsidies for fossil fuel over the medium term” to a session involving the smart green grid industry in the United States.
One side event entitled, “The Environment: A Core Corporate Strategy” featured a discussion by a vice president at Applied Materials (makers of hardware for the computer and solar industry) who discussed the fact that “sustainability” had moved out of the traditional role of the environmental department in the corporate structure to the core of business management. He discussed changes by management that included going from two plants to one, adding onsite energy production and making dietary changes in the cafeteria. At the same event, a vice president from PG&E discussed why they resigned from the US Chamber of Commerce and how they had integrated climate issues into their businesses.
At another side event called, “Managing Carbon as a Currency”, a panel discussed how and why companies had to treat carbon reductions like currency, i.e., how GHG assets and liabilities should be determined and valued. The panel discussed efforts to identify and standardize different GHG trading instruments and various accounting and tax issues associated with a carbon asset as well as futures trading. Yvonne McIntyre, vice president at Calpine (a wholesale electric generator using only natural gas and geothermal sources to generate electricity) talked about the medium term opportunities for her company as it moved to replace coal as coal becomes more expensive. She stated that they “are already factoring the cost of carbon in our new long term contracts”. She also announced the permitting of a new large plant in California which had gone through the best available control technology process for carbon dioxide.
