While there, it was my job to interview a number of experts and politicians about the politics, policy and realities of climate change. I cannot lie, it was a fascinating experience.

While I have been a believer for a number of years that we (humanity) need to change our ways, some of the things I discovered there really altered my thinking and understanding of the topic.

The main change for me happened at this side event held by the Committee of the Regions (an EU institution) where I was tasked with conducting a number of interviews after the event ( two of them can be found here and here ).

It was obvious as it was being explained to the room, but had not really crossed my mind before that point, that whatever the heads of government agree (or not!) it all has to be put in place at a local level. Local government, small businesses and private individuals are where the real changes will need to be made. Put bluntly, the future survival of humanity depends upon it.

As I say, it is pretty obvious, but I hadn’t thought about it for even a single second. Even though I was busy trying to do ‘my part’!I know, how stupid am I???

But as the conference continued, it became clear that this is not the focus at all. For now, everyone is still thinking about what government leaders will agree. In the meantime, small island states in the Indian and Pacific Oceans are facing a real and immediate threat to their existence as sea levels rise.

What Can We Do About This?

Several months later, it is clear that many people still seem to doubt if climate change is even real (the scientists all seem to agree though) and remain impervious to change. But really all we can do is try and change one person, business and house at a time. To do that, there needs to be much more education about how and why.

So I have decided to commission an online book about energy efficiency in the home and what householders can do to lower their carbon footprints.

As you may know, I run several websites and currently they generate over 600 unique visitors each day. I plan to simply give the ebook away for free from these websites (they are not all in the right online ‘niches’ but I am presuming that most or all of the people that visit my sites live somewhere…).

Since I am not an energy efficiency expert, I am having to pay for such a person to do the actual writing for me.

What Can You Do To Help?

I am hoping that visitors to my blog(s) and website(s) will be willing to chip in and help me foot the bill for this project. In web-speak, this is called crowd funding and uses the collective power of dispersed individuals online to raise money for projects.

This means that small donations of just a few dollars by a large enough group of people can assist to get a project off the ground. Think of it a little like an ‘angel donation’.

My hope is to raise upwards of US$2,000. The cost of writing the ebook will be close to that value (but in euros). It seems like quite a lot, but I don’t think this is something I can just outsource to an article writer in the Philippines as it needs some pretty specialised knowledge in places.

Any extra raised above this amount, will go towards putting a small website together – and promoting it – that can be used for extra distribution. So if you feel able, please give a little and the more I am able to collect, the more I will be able to promote, more people will be able to read it and, hopefully, less CO2 will be in the atmosphere in years to come!!

Please Click Here To Contribute To This Project.

The Small Print: The site above does not charge a fee for this, but the payment processor does charge a small fee per transaction. Be sure that I have found the lowest cost method of achieving this that I could…

Payments will be sent to a UK Limited company. That is my company and by sending it there, money that goes in can go out as a business expense and I (hopefully) won’t need to pay (much) tax on the money.

The event had an excellent array of speakers. Hosted by HRH Princess Laurentien of the Netherlands were European Commissioner for the Environment Janez Potočnik, Jo Leinen MEP, Pavan Sukhdev and others.

The TEEB project offers a fascinating insight into the “value” of nature and biodiversity. Needless to say, we humans have ignored or not even considered the economic value of the world around us. As Mr Sukhdev says, we make economic decisions with much relevant information missing. In short, without considering the full cost over a cycle of our actions, we make poor decisions.

This means that while in the short-term, we may make rational decisions (to fish in a certain area, fell trees, farm one crop ahead of another, etc) based on which action brings a greater economic value, the long-term impact may mean that we are making a poor decision. For example, over fishing generally means that fish stocks reduce, thus generating smaller and smaller catches in the future.

The event made me think a little about what a huge decision making fault this clearly is of human-kind. Any sort of understanding of the financial crisis in 2008 shows just how rational short-term decisions can lead to unintended (or ignored) long-term consequences.

By lending money now to people with no jobs and / or income, a large commission can be generated. Woohoo!! We all love large commissions!! But by doing this, we cause financial pain for the borrowers, add risk to the mortgage book, slightly weaken the overall state of the national economy and (via slicing and dicing) manage to weaken investment funds and pension portfolios around the world. Each decision in the chain was rational with a short or medium perspective, but clearly questionable over the long-term.

But hey, we love that commission payment!

And so it seems that we do exactly the same when it comes to our use of the environment. Lets be honest, we knew that anyway, we just had not had it quantified before. Every time a car engine is switched on, or a tree is felled, or, or, or, we cause a tiny little bit of damage. This damage has no immediate economic cost to us, so we ignore it. Hey, it was free!

But with climate change becoming a very serious issue for many tens and hundreds of millions of people right now, that economic cost is becoming more visible and relevant by the day.

Can you give more thought to the full cost of decisions in the future? It is difficult, but we all need to try.

From the perspective of an investor, there has been some interesting ideas floating around though.

A couple of days ago, your author sat in on a side event arranged by the Club de Madrid. As ever, the CdM had a number of high-profile and interesting speakers and guests, including the former President of Chile, Ricardo Lagos.

This session contained the usual smattering of former Presidents and Prime Ministers, but also included an address from Tracy Wolstencroft from Goldman Sachs.

If you want to hear interesting things about markets, listen to the guy from Goldman Sachs!

The overall message from the session was that the Copenhagen process is focusing on public money, but the sums required are so huge that hundreds of billions of dollars of private money will be required as well. It isn’t all required tomorrow, but much of it will be required in the coming three to five years or so.

Mr Wolstencroft suggests that the sums required to avert a global climate disaster are so large that they will essentially become the world’s largest ever emerging market. You hadn’t thought of it like that, had you?

Having seen a report a few months ago from the European Climate Foundation called Project Catalyst, it is reasonable to suggest that the coming ‘green’ energy gap is enormous and will take monster amounts of private investment to fill.

But this energy gap is only for energy production. The total numbers include emissions reductions and technology (known as clean tech),  upgrading the insulation (for energy efficiency) of public and private buildings and the entire housing stock of the world and much more.

However, the point being made was that this investment will need to be global, simply doing this in the developed world will not be sufficient. But, for developed world investors, much of the developing world is an investment no-go area. Without vastly improved legal protection of property rights, transparency and clear governmental policy making, this is unlikely to change. This suggests that new democratic policies are required in many nations to enable the capital to flow.

As was pointed out – and every investor knows – “capital wants to find a way to invest”.

So here is the point: can you, as a private investor, find a way to invest in this emerging market, make a profit and be doing good for society and humanity?

What?

Sounds like hyperbole to me…

Your author has a quite fortunate position in the media which allows access to all sorts of experts, politicians and events. Having spoken to some very knowledgable people about climate change, humanity is essentially doomed unless we do something quick-smart to change our ways.

You may have seen in the news stories that discuss aims to keep temperature rises to a maximum of 2 degress celcius within the next 100 years or so (the dates tend to vary). You might have also have read other experts state that we are almost certainly going to miss that target.

Not good.

2 degrees does not sound like much. It probably isn’t in the grand scheme of things. Well, 4 degrees is a bit of a nightmare that has the potential to unleash all sorts of problems as sea-levels rise, methane levels rise, more species are wiped out yada yada yada. We have heard it all before…

Well the thing you don’t hear so often – and has been said to me independently by three different and very knowledgable people – is that 6 degrees of temperature increase will equal, err, umm, phew, well, probably the extinction of mankind.

In short, if we don’t try and sort this out, within about 150 – 200 years, there might not be humanity. A pretty sobering thought I think you will agree.

150 years sounds like a long way away, but it isn’t really. Why? Because the effects will be being felt a long time before then. Somewhere in the region of 1 billion people live within 1 metre of sea-level. This could wipe out the population of places like Bangladesh with storm surges every time there is poor weather. And this could be happening with 50 – 100 years – it could be argued that it is happening already.

So we all need to make changes to our lifestyles if we – or our children or grandchildren – are to have a fighting chance at life. This means less trips in the car, eating less red meat, less flights, switching to energy efficient appliances and lighting, switching things off that are not in use, recycling and much more besides. Are you up to the challenge?

As a part of my work, it now seems highly likely that I will be in Copenhagen for the last few days of the summit. These will be the Ministers Days and Leaders Days. I will be there to try and obtain as many interviews as I can for my employer with my camcorder and microphone in hand, to be added to our blog platform. I’ll do my best to blog here about it as well.

Are you up to the challenge?

It would be fair to say that European water policy and the related directives are rather “dry” topics, if you will excuse the pun.

There were a number of things that we found interesting at the event and despite what is usually seen on television news, it is actually quite reassuring that such a sober and sensible group of people are trying to find ways to plan for and limit the impact that flooding and other water related problems can have on our lives.

This is one of those subjects where you don’t tend to notice things when they work well, but when it goes wrong, all hell breaks loose – such is our reliance on water and such is it’s power over our environment.

Something did raise it’s head – if only for a moment: financing.

Of course, money is always an issue, if anything needs to be done, someone needs to pay for it to be done. From there, the questions are, “How much?” and “Who?”

One of our interview subjects, Geoff Darch mentioned this briefly. In fact, he said that there would simply be too much to be done with the money available.

It seems – from my brief glimpse – that this could soon become another of ‘those costs’ soon to hit society at a time when society has barely any money to be hit. This would join the list of climate change financing, environmental and green tech investment, bank bailout loans, retirement provision for an ageing Western population and rising medical bills. This isn’t funny anymore!!

I want to say that it’ll be “fine” and we’ll “sort it out”, but there just seems to be too much to fix right now. The financial future for most governments seems bleak right now…

EBS is a very high level event. To my knowledge, there will be 10 European Commissioners there, many many, global CEOs and probably lots of other important folk that I am simply unaware of for now.

All this anticipation has had me thinking about the environment, climate change and investment a little more than might be normal…

Whilst the topics to be discussed – and the panels to discuss them – were set some time ago, they still appear to be relevant. In other words, since set, the world has not fixed either climate change or the global financial crisis and recession. It is quite possible that these issues could be identical next year. And the year after…

I wonder whether the financial world is suddenly switching off the capital to new, small companies that are trying to develop breakthrough clean energy technologies and equipment. If they are then it could be a shame for more than just some venture capital investors. It could be a real problem for us all.

In this recent report by Ethical Corp. they report how the ultra-rich are not very well targeted with specialist ethical investments – even though interest in such products is rising. The mega-wealthy of this world, of which I am not one, have massive amounts of investment potential and would be a sure way of bringing capital into these smaller firms.

Of course, other ways of creating funds for what is known as ethical investment include venture capital, private equity, hedge funds and angel investors. Currently, most of that list would appear to have bigger issues to worry about (short-term survival) than investing for the planet.

Governments too can and should play a part in developing lower impact technology, but it could easily appear that they are a little ‘tapped out’ right now, having helped out the world’s banks and insurance companies.

I will be sure to report back on anything interesting I pick up on this and other related topics at EBS. Until then…

There can be no doubt that as governments have taken on huge additional borrowing on top of what was already huge borrowing, taxes must somehow rise to pay the interest bills – if not to actually repay the debt.

Of course, the credit markets still appear to be largely blocked as few banks want to lend money to anyone or anything else. Trust in financial organisations has left the building. The longer this remains, the harder it will be for small companies to fund expansion and grow.

This presumes that they have markets to grow in. With consumer spending in such trouble around the world and property prices falling, the average consumer is loaded up with debt and only assets that are falling in value to hold against it.

These same consumers have seen the value of their retirement funds plummet. If you were planning to retire in 2009, 2010 or any time in the next decade, it seems like that might suddenly be becoming a pipe-dream. Almost all stock market based assets have fallen massively.

But these things are all now. The future will be better. Won’t it?

What if there are reasons to suggest that the days of endless growth are over?

In December 2009, the UN Climate Conference will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark. Any treaty that is agreed – and there is no guarantee that anything will be agreed – will be a replacement to Kyoto.

To meet the types of reductions in carbon emissions that will be required to avert human extinction through climate problems, all countries will need to reduce their use of carbon. The good times are over. Now it will be hard work for us all from here on.

The highest polluters – the United States – is likely to need to cut emissions by plus or minus 90% by 2050. Yes, you read that correctly – 90%.

This does not just relate to targets set by government that we all ignore. This does not relate to corporations that print too many documents and leave the lights on too long. This will relate to us all.

Imagine what a 90% cut in emissions would mean to your lifestyle. The daily commute to work will need to change. When you have heating or air-conditioning on at home will need to change. Your daily newspaper is unsustainable. You will need to walk everywhere. You will need to recycle everything. Food may become more scarce and the range we have today will certainly be reduced. Flights to foreign destinations will literally “cost the earth”.

The good times will be over and we will all be paying the price.

In the face of this coming reduction in everything, can economic growth continue unfettered? There will be many businesses that simply cannot survive – their products will require too much energy.

There will of course be winners. But they will be far fewer than the losers.

Are you starting to prepare yet?