Ecocentric

Climate: Can Business Stop Global Warming?

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I’m in Mexico City for the next two days, attending the B4E Climate Summit. B4E is conference speak (and text message speak) for business for the environment, and it’s a meeting that brings together sustainability experts at major corporations from around the world—Siemens, Coca-Cola, McKinsey—to discuss how business can become greener. That’s a common enough message, but the timing and place for this conference are particularly notable. Right now diplomats are meeeting in the Chinese city of Tianjin, for the last formal round of negotiations on the UN climate track before the annual summit in December—which will be held in the Mexican resort town of Cancun.

Expectations aren’t high for the Cancun meeting, in part because climate politics in the U.S. and elsewhere have gone into reverse. (See Ryan Lizza’s long piece in the New Yorker for a really in-depth analysis of how the Obama Administration fumbled the only—albeit dim—chance for climate legislation.) That makes the role of corporate leaders who actually do care about the planet—and are willing to bet capital and prestige on it—all the more important this year. The organizes of the B4E summit want representatives from a number of corporate sectors—from energy to building to food—to send a clear message to the negotiators at Cancun this December. We’ll see if they can pull that together—and whether the diplomats will listen.