Beyond Copenhagen: Is this the moment Teesside reinvents itself?

Feb 9 2010 by Sue Scott, Evening Gazette

The third in a series of Big Issue debates held in association with Teesside University and the Tees Valley Institute of Directors came in the same week as a series of stories which undermined the theory of climate change. After Copenhagen What Next? also coincided with nations giving their lukewarm response to the green summit. SUE SCOTT reports.

IT’S a little over six weeks since the powerful image of an exasperated UK climate change minister, Ed Miliband, standing in his underpants in a Danish hotel room brought home to us the critical importance of the Copenhagen summit.

Any geopolitical jamboree that brings a senior member of the British government close to rushing into the chill Scandinavian night to save a deal without his trousers - notwithstanding global warming - has got to be a showstopper.

Sadly, despite Mr Miliband’s almost indecent haste, rushing back to the convention room to prevent a complete meltdown of negotiations that were meant to bring global consensus on time-limited reduction to emissions, Copenhagen failed to deliver much.

Should we care? Perhaps it was, after all, wishful thinking that world leaders with such wildly contradictory ambitions (from China’s aggressive plans for industrial expansion to Britain’s insistence we clear up the environmental mess we’ve made first) would strike a meaningful deal.

And for most Brits, busy doing their bit to save the planet, Copenhagen was just a storm in a wheelie bin.

But here on Teesside, whose economic future looks increasingly tied to the success of green industries, the weakness of the Copenhagen accord could have a very real impact - not least on the value of carbon for which major polluters have to pay and on whose price projects such as the carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant planned for Teesside in large part depend.

Following Copenhagen, which should have given a strong steer to carbon markets that there would be no place for business to hide from ever tighter emissions controls, thereby increasing the trading value of carbon and making investment in green technology cheap by comparison, the price of carbon fell.