Road from Copenhagen
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Much of the world’s hope for action to curb Climate Change was placed in the Copenhagen conference in December 2009. The political differences however proved too great for an agreement to be reached. With so much invested in the conference, why did it fail? Commentators too numerous to mention have analysed the events in detail, and have provided many possible answers. Ultimately however, it is clear that climate change is not an issue of sufficient political weight to force the politicians to reach an agreed solution. For many of the huge populations of Asian countries, including China and India, awareness of climate change is limited and the effect on daily lives is either unknown or not considered to be an imminent threat. |
Given that another conference is likely to fail for similar reasons, what we need is to make climate change a topic for regular discussion at the community level. This is a daunting task: even films regarded as major successes such as the Inconvenient Truth and the 11th Hour only reached a small fraction of the population. To reach further we need to adopt a different tack. Community Carbon Offsetting is one way to reach people because it brings benefits to them. Scaled up to a large enough size, Community Carbon Offsetting has the power to change the thinking of the public and move their political leaders towards reaching a negotiated global solution.
There is a growing movement of people who believe that the community can lead the way forward, rather than hoping that politicians will make it happen. Sir David King, the former Chief Scientific Advisor of the UK government has expressed the same view here.
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