The hot goss from Copenhagen

In case you’ve been distracted by the holiday season or recovering from numerous Christmas parties lately you may not have noticed all the hype around climate change and Copenhagen.

As well as 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders, the likes of Prince Charles, Leonardo DiCaprio, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Lucy Lawless will be descending on the Danish capital to help engineer a global ‘agreement’ on tackling one of the most controversial issues of the century.


The eleven-day conference, including the participants' travel, will create a total of 41,000 tonnes of 'carbon dioxide equivalent'. Word is out that 1,200 limos and 140 private planes have already been hired by some of the delegates. Talk about fuelling the skeptics' fire.

Essentially there are two camps. One camp is calling for an extension of Kyoto (a treaty adopted in 1997 and expires in 2012) to agree to more formal mechanisms like carbon trading and further commitments to reducing CO2. The other camp, mainly led by the US, are calling for long term co-operative action which means that every country (despite size and economic profile) commits to some kind of action that suits that country.

Our Prime Minister, John Key is there representing us with our offer of 10% reduction in greenhouse gas by 2020, which has already been snubbed by 450 members of the Climate Action Network. On Friday NZ was awarded the ‘fossil of the day’ award - a cup filled with coal and adorned with a toy dinosaur.

So will there be an ‘agreement’? The lynch–pin of success at the conference will depend entirely upon the interplay between the two super powers: China and the US (responsible for 40% of world’s emissions). The developing nations will want their voice heard too, calling for 40% reductions from the developed countries. Even tiny Tuvla in the Pacific has managed to drive a wedge (not made from caviar) in the talks saying that rich countries caused global warming, and so it was their responsibility to fix it and asking for more legally binding agreements. A move that was, not surprisingly, blocked by the likes of China, India and Saudi Arabia.

Bringing it back to NZ, regardless of the science and politics there is the potential to be a part of a huge market, one, which if we are slow to react, we will miss the boat on. British economist Nicholas Stern describes the climate crisis as the “greatest and widest ranging market failure ever seen”. So whatever the outcome, NZ needs to ensure that it keeps itself afloat to ensure that we weather the proverbial storm and stand alongside not behind our global neighbours.