United Nations Climate Change Conference

The below post is from Harriet Riley in response to TOTO Challenge #1

The Poor Poor Polar Bears: Far from being a problem for other species, climate change is already robbing people in developing nations of their homes and livlihoods

It’s good to be back in Copenhagen for the COP15. This is the place I came to two years ago trying to answer one simple question; how do you run a functional society? Being happy, prosperous and good-looking to boot is something the Danes have always been famous for, and this stable home-life has freed them up to play advocate on the international stage for more generous aid projects and green development. No doubt these were the people to answer my question. But my quest left me mildly unsatisfied –it was one of those ‘simple’ questions, after all, the type that only the United Nations, ancient Greek philosophers and myself ever seem to bother with– and I’m hoping that this time, at the climate summit, I can find a better answer.

In early 2008 I found myself seated with 99 other bright-eyed young people in an airy lecture theatre of the CPH Business School. We are attending the Copenhagen Consensus Youth Forum hosted by the infamous Bjørn Lomborg of ‘Sceptical Environmentalist’ fame. In front of us, a panel of Nobel Prize winning economists nodded and hummed as they tried to explain, in terms we would understand, just what was wrong with our complicated world.

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