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?

CNN has today published a story about the likelyhood of seal-level flooding costing US$28 trillion by 2050.

This story is based on research for the insurance company Allianz – one place where the costs of floods will be severly felt – and the WWF ahead of the Copenhagen summit in early December.

As an aside, I’d expect lots more stories like this in the coming days. They are being timed to force attention onto the negotiations and – hopefully – to get everyone to agree a deal.

Whether this number is real, who can say? It seems big, very big. But then if you submerged London, New York, Rio, Barcelona and a few other large cities, the cost would be, well, very big. So let us not argue about the costs. It is only splitting hairs when the numbers are this big…

Instead, think about the impact on the property industries, insurance industry – and more importantly – national economies (it is worth bearing in mind that if, for example, London were to truly be flooded, a very large part of the UK economy would simply stop). The impact on the finances of the globe would be catastrophic.

To use an example that is happening right now, Cumbria in the North West of England has been hit by floods and heavy rain – while parts of Ireland are under water as well.

To quote from that BBC story, “The cost of damage is expected to run into tens of millions of pounds.” Those ‘tens of millions of pounds’ relate to 900 properties and businesses that have been hit.

Anyone that has been to Cumbria will know that it isn’t exactly the most densely populated place on earth, partly because of the multitude of hills and wild country. But of all places, they ought to be able to cope, after all, much of Cumbria is known as the ‘Lake District’. If they aren’t used to lots of water – and it rains a lot up there – who is?

So what would be the impact of major flooding hitting a capital city like London or New York? “Total economic shut-down” would be my guess.

And a new definition of the term ‘offshore banking haven’.

My mind has been changed. We need to take this ‘water’ thing much more seriously than we already do…

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…

The EBS event gets some very high-profile politicians and business folk. This year they included the top-man at the European Commission, Barroso, and President Gul from Turkey.

I was there to interview some of these great and good for my employer. In actual fact, I didn’t interview anyone. I would circle the halls looking for the high-profile people (moderators and speakers mostly) and then try and talk them into a short video interview. The really high-profile people would generally have an entourage of handlers and bodyguards making them impossible to approach.

Of all the people we spoke to, only one really stood out in finance and investment terms. I spoke to a “clean tech” venture capitalist. He is an investment manager for a firm here in Belgium, GIMV. Whether his work could be classed as ethical investment or environmental investment, I’m not sure.

So here is Bart Diels, a genuine VC being interviewed about the way funds are drying up and the VC cycle as it relates to environmental technology.