The UN Secretary-General and Condaleezza Rice May Think This Week that They Are Insuring A Less Carbon Emitting Global Future, But The Reality Is That The Future Belongs To A US Corporate Leadership That Is Aiming At Going Environmentally Green Because It Makes Good Business/Money Green Sense.

On Friday we participated at two pre-UN-Talk-Fest press conferences. The one was in a UNDP Building, across from the UN headquarters and the speaker was Olav Kjorven, the Director for Development Policy at UNDP. He is from Norway and made it clear that any development policy run by UNDP will from now be scrutinized for being indeed within the requirements of Sustainable Development - if it is not sustainable it is not development!

The other meeting was in the German House, the home of the German Mission to the UN, and it was organized by the German Green Heinrich Boell Foundation and the New York based WEDO (Women’s Environment & Development Organization). The stars of this meeting, a Roundtable, were the Norwegian “mother-of-it-all”  - the former Prime Minister of Norway and the the Head of the Commission that coined the term Sustainable Development, H.E. (medical) Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, who will now also be one of the facilitators of the New York, September 24 meeting at the UN. She is one of three UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoys on Climate Change - and she will co-chair the “Mitigation” sessions, and H.E. Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland, and now Chair, Council of Women Leaders.

We spoke at length with Dr. Brundtland and came away with the feeling that she fully believes in the power of quiet diplomacy, exchange of views between the 80 heads of State or Heads of Government that will get a few minutes each to say their thing on Monday. She believes that positions will become clear and that somehow - they will  somehow - converge on the way to Bali - which is the “must” date of these efforts to rein in the climate change menace.
The roundtable moderated by Mary Robinson was intended to point out the disproportionate suffering incurred by women and children because of climate change in poor countries. The smallest sinners are the biggest losers in this man-induced global warming and climate change.

We will yet come back to the arguments we wrote down in above two meetings, that coincidentally were spearheaded by people from a large oil exporter - but a country that was first to have also a carbon-tax - and as Mrs. Brundtland said - a country that its continental shelf emits half as much carbon as the European average.

But he Purpose of this article is to highlight a completely different meeting we attended this week - and which we found much more promising then the efforts at the UN - this because it was not dependent on the will of large and small minded, elected or despotic leaders of territories that give sovereignty to their people - or refuse to do so. That is how we tend to view the UN talk-fest, even though, like Mrs. Brundtland, we know that the UN will have to be a participant in all of this - though, it will be a very slow moving ship of more-or-less grandstanding mantled people some of whom do indeed care very much about their citizens. A German diplomat to whom I voiced my misgivings about the power of the UN to achieve positive goals was much more optimistic then myself.

The ray of light we saw this week was shining out of a pure commercial event that was held at the Torch Club of the New York University in Greenwich Village.

Peter Fusaro who was a US Government Bureaucrat in the days of President Carter, and was involved in the first US efforts of doing something about alternate fuels, including ethanol, he is now, simply out of good business sense, and greed for making money, to teach corporations about the nature of the problems, and how they can start figuring out a way to make money out of the unavoidable efforts that will be instituted, out of pure necessity to do the right thing.

So, I saw in that room, 11 people from very serious money-making organizations, hedge funds, financial institutions, business planners from Brazil, Hong Kong, India, Central Asia, Washington, Texas, California, and yes - business media that all dished out a large sum of money to listen to pearls of wisdom. I was most probably the only free-loader at that meeting, this thanks to old ties, but these lines are not written in exchange for the sandwich I ate there.                              No! These comments of mine come because I think I saw the light:

Climate Change will be tackled under US leadership in about three years from now. To be specific, there will be a new President in the White House and it will take him a year to establish a new Administration.

Unimportant who will be President, it is the US business chiefs that will push him to do the right thing and start to lead the world again - this  in cooperation with business leaders in other major polluting countries. It is this corporate network - out of greed and interest to serve the people who are their consumers - they will have the day.                             If that were not the case why in this world did they spend the money and the time to come and listen to Mr. Fusaro?

Though I know Mr. Fusaro for many - many - years - going back to the days of the original Energy Economists’ meetings, he is now up to something real, and he is on the winning course of the most important global issue of our days.

In the end it will be green indeed - environmentally and money-wise.  Remembe please, we also had an article welcoming Qaddafi’s son - if he really meansnow a different green. We had articles pointing at Saudi Arabia not just as culprits of the past, but also as impediments to the future. Will They Change, or they will wait until the world business leaders will declare their underground treasures unclean. Will they learn to accept a fate of continuing with a new existance based on the money they already have, rather then asking for compensation for future loss of business. Will the UN wake up to throw out arguments from this sort of sovereign leaders?