Without a doubt, the best word to describe a COP is a circus. There are some 11,600 registered delegates, ranging from presidents to vegan activists too young to vote, from captains of industry to bureaucrats inhabiting innumerable byzantine United Nations agencies. There is no doubt that the energy is both exhilarating and exhausting and the sheer breadth of the human experience that you can witness in comparatively tight quarters is impressive.
But is it doing anything to really combat the threat of climate change? What began some 20 years ago as a relative diplomatic backwater has now spawned its own bureaucratic industry and inertia. One must sometimes wonder whether the "full democracy and full consensus" model that characterizes the U.N. process can ever actually create the conditions needed to truly fight climate change -- which is namely, a global system that will create, finance and implement trillions of dollars of climate-friendly technologies that science unequivocally tells us we need to do, if we are to make the last minute swerve away from climatic disaster.
When you get away from the high minded statements that ministers give in their allotted two minutes, on the big stage with and in front of their gathered peers, you quickly realize the "devil is in the details." When you dig down into the details even a little bit, you find a convoluted process that sometimes even seems lucky to find the lowest common denominator.
While I track only but a small fragment of the many dialogues that flow constantly through the COP, the ones I track revolve around what I consider to be a core concept of any rational climate regime: finding equitable ways to reduce developing countries' emissions growth, while at the same time not impacting their economic development trajectory. The only tool we have enables that possibility is the carbon market of emissions trading.
Yet, when the U.N. talks about such things, it is apparently prohibited to even mention the term "carbon market"-favoring instead the euphemistic phrase "flexible mechanisms." And while the potential of the flexible mechanisms is almost universally applauded, the result of U.N. oversight is a regulatory process created by a legislature that meets 10 days at a time twice a year to cover an ever widening pool of issues. In addition, when you layer together nearly 200 countries into this process, the results are often incredibly slow and that the default outcome is progress that sometimes seems best measured -- ironically -- in geologic time.
How about this then for a different approach -- simply convene the top 20 countries together in one room (who incidentally account for 85 percent of global emissions) and agree how to save the planet in the shortest time frame possible, with the least economic impact. Failing that, one can only hope that the coming breakneck year of negotiations to the Copenhagen COP is filled with the urgency of the situation. If we are to attack the climate issue with the scale and speed required, more of the same simply will not do.
Marc Stuart is a co-founder of EcoSecurities, a company that works with companies in developing and industrializing countries to create emission reduction credits from projects that reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.