It's gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day (COP 15)

21 Dec 2009 – Gary Kendall

As I fled – it’s the right verb, under the circumstances – the Bella Center for the final time late on Saturday morning, I recalled my first blog entry on Thursday 10th December, which I wrote immediately prior to my departure from the UK. In it, I admitted to harbouring “mixed feelings” about the nine days ahead. Post-COP 15, they remain mixed, though for quite different reasons. The Copenhagen Climate Conference of 2009 has left me shaken, but not stirred.

Isn’t it Ironic? (No, it isn’t.)

I emerged from the scene of the crime to sparkling daylight and a thick blanket of snow. One popular climate sceptic website proclaimed with scarcely concealed schadenfreude how “ironic” it was that a conference on global warming should be concluded in such Arctic conditions.

Hmmm. Perhaps this would be ironic if we were in Bali for COP 13, or in Nairobi for COP 12. But, please, in Copenhagen, latitude 55° North, in late December…? I wonder if that particular blogger shares Alanis Morisette’s flimsy grasp of what constitutes irony (“It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife” – this would indeed be ironic if, the day before, you’d been looking for a spoon and only found ten thousand knives).

Two degrees is too much

Yes, I’m thoroughly disappointed with the outcome of COP 15, and I imagine the 950 or so leading businesses from all over the world – including carbon-intensive industrial giants like Shell, RWE, American Electric Power – that signed the Copenhagen Communiqué calling for a robust global treaty and corresponding investment certainty will be disappointed too. They certainly should be, for what came out of Copenhagen merely adds to the complexity and risk that confronts these corporations as they face up to the challenge of decarbonisation.

So what, if anything, did COP 15 deliver? Well, for the first time, a UNFCCC Conference of the Parties defined what is meant by the Convention’s ultimate objective: we have to keep the rise in global average surface temperature below 2°C versus the long-term pre-industrial average. To the extent that there were mumblings of discontent with this figure, it was that 2°C is too high, not too restrictive. This point alone will have massive repercussions for business and society at large. It draws a line in the sand that says – if we accept the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the global energy system will be zero carbon by 2050. As I mentioned in an earlier post, this is a monumental challenge, essentially our next moonshot.

Put simply, it probably means: no fossil fuel combustion without carbon capture and storage. And this means: no fossil fuel use in mobile applications, since we are unlikely to be able to economically capture and store tailpipe CO2 emissions any time soon. All things considered, we are talking about a total transformation of the ways in which we produce and consume energy, which will impact virtually every aspect of our lives. For the six out of seven top corporations in the world that currently generate shareholder value by extracting, processing, distributing, and retailing liquid transport fuels, shockwaves are currently reverberating around board rooms. Any business strategy that is blind to the 2°C threshold is no longer tenable.

Ch-ch-ch-ch Changes

As I sped across the Oresund Bridge to Sweden for the final time, I caught a glimpse of a giant offshore wind farm generating carbon-free electrons that power – among other things – the impressively clean and efficient mass-transit Öresundståg that frequently overtakes hundreds of dirty, polluting, diesel- and gasoline-powered private automobiles on the asphalt highway a few metres above my head. And we are asked by many to believe that the carbon-constrained future is a miserable hair-shirt existence of back-breaking manual labour and general hardship.

At Copenhagen airport this morning, I spotted a poster from the Swedish electric utility Vattenfall, showing a plug-in hybrid Volvo car beneath the slogan “2.5 € per 100km”. Yes, this is the future. What a thoroughly miserable prospect – I vote for another hundred years of Big Oil and King Coal. Rising sea levels? Bring it on, but under no circumstances take away my SUV. My most cherished moments are those in which I’m remortgaging my house to pay for my next visit to the motorway services.

Vattenfall advert seen at Copenhagen airport

Everywhere I look, I see the evidence that the low-carbon transformation will not grind to a halt simply because politicians and diplomats have been found wanting as they struggled to overcome their own narrow self-interests. International treaties and regulatory frameworks can certainly help – or hinder – the transition, but it is action on the part of all citizens – however they define themselves – that will aggregate to deliver change on the scale required.

What are we waiting for?

In keeping with the underlying current of this blog, I’m going to finish with a song, from a Caribbean delegate who can only be described as “Good COP”.

One of the Good COPs