Cleaner Greener China

…. the COP15 talks, which will try to establish a global action plan for mitigating carbon emissions, are expected to have a positive impact on the global clean technology sector even without a comprehensive global agreement necessarily being reached

A few issues with the above quote, from a recent Cleantech Press Release:
1) Are we now focused on reducing carbon emissions? I thought it was carbon dioxide that was the problem… or is the word dioxide now adding too much complexity to messages?

2) What is the goal of COP15? Is it, as I would hope, supposed to be a forum where issues surrounding the mitigation of negative human influences are to take place? Or are we just going to scrap the idea that this is a wider issue than “carbon” and it will require more than “cleantech”

Don’t get me wrong. I am a fan of new technologies, hybrid cars, and solar panels as products that are certainly improvements over previous options, but I think we are one again positioning the issues in the wrong direction.

We are moving away from having deep discussions towards topical items with fancy names that will bring little real benefit to the masses.

Discussions I seem to have locally, but I have yet to see occur on the global stage, and given the fact that there are environmental failures occurring now more frequently and in larger scales, I think we really need to begin working on what the real goals of forums like COP15 are.

…and how it has come to be that we are no longer talking about issues wider than carbon.

Carbon is not the problem. Carbon Dioxide is a byproduct of problems.