A silver lining to the Copenhagen cloud?
Although December’s UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen was widely portrayed as a failure, some speakers at an MIT panel discussion on Friday, Feb. 5, suggested that its results actually represent real progress in the world’s efforts to head off the dangers of climate change — and that in fact the results may have been better, in the long run, than an outcome that most people would have considered a “success” at the time.The Copenhagen conference “has elicited some strong reactions, both positive and negative,” said MIT Energy Initiative Director Ernest J. Moniz as he introduced the panelists for the event, called “The Road from Copenhagen.” Officially known as the COP 15 conference (15th Conference of the Parties), some have taken to calling it “Copout 15,” he said. “At a minimum, it was an interesting process.”Robert Stavins, professor of business and government at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, opened with...