The business leader's guide to the low carbon economy

Compared to last year’s fiasco at Copenhagen, the world climate summit at Cancun was a modest success. Here’s what was agreed.

• National emission plans are now part of a formal UN agreement and will be monitored and evaluated.

• Delegates confirmed that climate change remains a serious issue and there was a renewed commitment to prevent global warming exceeding two degrees.

• There was a new emphasis on adaptation. While preventing global warming remains an important goal, there was an acceptance that mitigation efforts could be too little, too late. Putting mechanisms in place to support poorer countries adapt to climate change is equally important.

• Renewed support for REDD, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation. Something like 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions are caused by the destruction of rain forests, so slowing this process will have a big impact.

• A green climate fund will help poorer countries with new technologies to reduce their carbon intensity.

It’s by no means all good news – it remains unlikely that global temperature rise can be restricted to two degrees this century, and the really tough negotiations will be in South Africa next year when the Kyoto protocol expires. But the Cancun agreement is not only a small step in the right direction, but a lot better than many people hoped.

Last year’s Copenhagen climate summit attracted a huge amount of media attention. This year’s similar event in Cancun, Mexico, is attracting almost none. Why?

Pre Copenhagen, many people believed that is was still possible to reach some kind of global agreement that would reduce the emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in order to have a decent chance of restricting global warming to less than 2 degrees.

Post Copenhagen, almost no one believes that any more. It’s incredibly difficult to predict climate change, but most people now accept that we’re in for at least three degrees by the end of this century, if not considerably more. It’s too late to prevent it happening.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t still decarbonise the world’s economy – there are sound reasons to do so, not only in relation to climate change but also for reasons of energy security and economic growth. And we should certainly put lots of effort in mitigating the effects of climate change, especially on the poorest people in the world who will be hardest hit. But it’s naïve to think that we can prevent significant, game changing climate change from happening.

Persuading the seven billion people who live on this planet to reduce their CO2 emissions is proving to be quite a hard sell – especially to those 310 million North Americans who are each responsible for more than 20 tonnes of CO2 every year.

Geo engineering offers a different solution to the problem of climate change. Why not carry on burning fossil fuels, and instead reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere directly?  Better still, allow CO2 levels to rise but restrict the sunlight hitting the earth’s surface.

Once the domain of science fiction, geo engineering has become increasingly respectable, as today’s conference at the Royal Society in London demonstrates.

Amongst geo engineering solutions discussed – paint roofs white to reflect back more sunlight; breed crops to be shinier so they reflect back more sunlight; sprinkle iron fillings into the oceans to increase the take up of CO2 by algae; sprinkle sulphates into the atmosphere to mimic the effects of volcanic dust in screening the sun’s rays; put giant mirrors in space to reflect sunlight away from the earth.

Geo engineering is fraught with technical and moral dilemmas – but history shows that if human beings become desperate enough, they’ll try anything.

More on geo-engineering from the Guardian newspaper

A report on geo engineering from the Royal Society

In California, you can put any proposition you like to a referendum, providing you can get 5% of the registered voters to say that they want one. In the recent elections ten propositions were put to the vote, including one that would have effectively scrapped the state’s commitment to reducing its CO2 emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

The yes campaign spent more than $10m, largely funded by the oil companies. The no campaign spent $25m, largely funded by Silicon Valley firms (including Google) that support renewable energy.

The motion was defeated and California retains its commitment to CO2 reductions, and to supplying a third of its power from renewables within the next ten years.

Imagine this frightening, but plausible, scenario. Sometime in the next twenty or thirty years CO2 levels in the atmosphere have reached 450 ppm and triggered runaway global warming. The Greenland ice sheets are melting, sea levels are rising rapidly, and millions of the earth’s population are in peril. Even if CO2 emissions fell to zero, the accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere would continue to drive temperatures upwards. What do we do then?

One answer is geo-engineering – combating the effects of climate change without actually reducing emissions.

We know it works

The most popular approach would be to inject sulphur into the atmosphere, mimicking the effects of volcanic eruptions which block out the sunlight and so reduce global temperatures. Ten kilogramme of sulphur could offset the warming effects of a million tonnes of carbon dioxide. You could get it into the atmosphere by balloon, from military air-to-air refuelling aircraft, or even by adding it to conventional aircraft fuel.

If you don’t like the idea of adding more gunk into the atmosphere, how about launching millions of tiny mirrors into space, and having them reflect some of the sun’s light directly away from earth? Much more expensive, but somehow more environmentally friendly.

Alternatively, how about encouraging the growth of CO2 absorbing plankton in the world’s oceans, by feeding them more iron?

None of these methods is currently feasible, for ethical, political and financial reasons, but in a few decades time we might be more desperate. Watch this space.