Sound-off

There will be total and harmonious agreement to halt carbon emission immediately, limiting the rise in global temperature to a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius and miraculously saving the planet.

Unfortunately, this is obviously nothing more than a fairy tale. Even so, there is still the chance for the politicians to make a landmark deal at Copenhagen. But the problem is that we have lost touch with reality and become obsessed with artifice.

I keep hearing the argument that in a global recession, we cannot afford to deal with the problems triggered by a move towards a more sustainable future. Our current economic climate is built on artifice: we have created the financial system that now burdens us with its problems and we have created ways of dealing with it, by printing bonds, raising capital and so on.

But climate change is real, not artifice: there are no clever ways round it. The solution is simple, stop wasting natural resources and needlessly burning fossil fuels. We are not going to achieve our goal by producing frameworks, setting targets, and finding complex ways of assessing our progress against those frameworks.

We could find that the numerical geniuses behind Enron could come up with a system that demonstrates how we have reduced emissions by 80 per cent against a baseline from 1957 - but it won’t make it real.

What we need from Copenhagen is action. Yes, it will be called a landmark summit and we will have an agreement but let’s not get over-excited by this. The road from Copenhagen will be far more important than the road to it. Only when we have reached the milestones set can we claim it to be a landmark summit.

Paul Davies, group carbon manager, Wates

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