I’ve just read that progress at the Climate Change conference talks in Copenhagen are “too slow”. I’ve done some tricky negotiations in my time, but I can only imagine how complex and what interests need to be handled in this sort of event.
It’s not even that there’s a for and against argument – it’s not sceptics versus ecofundamentalists, it’s nations (and blocs such as the EU or G77-China) with a complex pattern of interests and views that need to be taken into account in reaching a conclusion that everyone can sign up to.  

Look, if you want the scientific analysis of climate change, this is not going to be the blog for you. 
I’ve no truck with the denier/ sceptics who always seem to be on the side of business that doesn’t want to change what it has already invested in even if it brings about the end of the world as we know it.
But nor do I feel it’s right that environmentalism has become a belief system. 
We can’t have zero impact on the earth in an industrialised or post-industrialised country – to have no impact, even an agrarian society would be a mistake.  What we can do is to try to minimise the impact that we are having.
But there’s no one right way of doing so.  Attacking Climate Change secretary Ed Milliband for being honest enough to admit that he and his partner use disposable rather than reusable cloth nappies without considering that the reusable ones don’t just spring into existence and there’s a remarkable absence of cotton fields here in the UK – it just shows that a greener-than-thou mentality is alive and well and living in yummy mummy England. Presumably not the same mums driving t5he kids to school in a 4×4 becuase “it’s safer” though…

But Copenhagen needs to succeed.
Here’a a quick top 3 of why…

1) As any parent knows, I don’t care who is responsible for this mess, I just want it cleared up NOW, otherwise no one will be getting any kind of treat at all for the forseeable future… 
Is climate change entirely man-made? A natural phenomenon? A mixture of the two?  
I’m inclined towards the mixture argument because the fact that there have been ice ages in the past indicate that the temperature of the planet does vary over time, but I gather that the vast speed and intensity of change is what appears to be being dictated by our actions and the science backs that.

But the point is that this is a sterile debate. 
It really doesn’t matter whether it was me or mother nature alone that got the environment to this state, someone’s got to sort it out and if we can see that CO2 emissions and our energy guzzling ways are having an impact then we need to sort that out. 
It’s all feeling a bit like those cigarette companies that go there’s no proven link between cigarette smoke and lung cancer while having to pay out compensation to smokers, while all the time seeking out new ways of getting new customers hooked (such as the dispicable practice of selling individual cigarettes for a few pennies to young people in Africa who would not be able to afford the price of a whole packet). 
Or people as fat as me or fatter who pretend its all genetic rather than accepting that appropriate exercise and a better diet with more fruit and veg and less processed food in it would make a difference.

Something is happening (at the very least the weather is getting more extreme) and we can’t just throw up our hands and say will of the gods these days, so we have a responsibility to try to do something about making the lives of the people on this planet easier as it happens.  Think of them as the potential consumers for the goods or services that you produce if you need to have some kind of economic rationale behind it.  Gordon Brown mentioned green technology in his response to a question about whether it was right to give the developing world money to combat climate change in the midst of our own recession – and he was right to do so because if you can’t get people to understand the moral case, show them how their wallets can be aided and you’ll get their attention…  

2) Explaning it to the kids
There’s an old proverb that we don’t own the earth, we’re looking after it for our children.  It may be trite, but there’s a truth behind it.
I’ve blogged at length on recycling (here, here), and also mentioned that greener living is presented as the norm on Cbeebies.

Ed Miliband has a child in nappies.  That means that he is part of the same generation as me. 
That means that at least some of the negotiators at Copenhagen are not wise sages of an older generation - they’re my generation. 
So it’s my generation’s responsibility to get it right, right now. 
We can’t be the generation that saw things happening but dismissed them as not our problem to handle – how on earth would we be able to look future generations in the eye and say:
“well, although we had scientific results that showed that there was a serious problem we were more bothered about leaked emails whether there was collusion to exaggerate the problem becuase that excused us from taking the problem seriously and… what’s that? Email?  That was an electronic communications system which we used on our personal computers.  We used to sit with electric lights on, listening to music on electrical devices all the time not just on wind-up radios, our big flatscrren TVs eating power while we talked with people not just here, or in the same town but right across the world through email, skype, IM, twitter, facebook etc.  Those were the days, eh?  Life without power cuts. Who’d've thought it, eh?”
The 21st century is the century wherw we’re learning to live online as well as in the real world.  I wouldn’t want to only be able to cope with the online world, and then only if the power was available.  
My parents’ generation are having a tough enough time explaining to mine how as baby boomers they afford to live in a house with more bedrooms than people, can retire at 60 and expect to live the rest of their lives with their needs taken care of by the working generation, but my generation struggles to afford a mortgage on ex-Council houses, looks set to work well beyond 70 and will need to make pension and health care provisions becuase while the NHS free-at-the-point-of-use is sacrosanct for politicians at present, with more people living longer something’s going to give at some point. 
Now skip to explaining to my child how we see cars to pop around in and aeroplance flights as a right, electronic goods as necessities, meat as something for more than one meal a day… and however selfish the babyboomer generation may seem, we’re just as bad, just differently…
Just occasionally we’ve a chance to not screw it up for them - can we really not take it?    

5) Basically Copenhagen needs to succeed because we all need a bit of a kick up the arse on this stuff…

`In a world of market economics, if there’s enough consumer pressure, the market shall provide.  We’re starting to see this a bit but at the moment it’s still a bit of a niche – still, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk has gone free trade, so may be just may be…  But we’re not there yet and while simpler, cheaper but non-environmentally friendly alternatives persist, there’s little chance that we’ll switch.

We are encouraged to focus on what we CAN do, but while few of us consider the Prius as first car choice at present (price and space for child car seat and boot space for buggy tend to dictate our choice along with fuel economy and emissions rating) we need to be aware that shipping it over to where we are is a source of carbon emissions. 

I mentioned the nightmare of disposable nappies which take thousands of years to rot down – but while society requires working parents, buckets of napisan and constant loads of washing are not appealing, and the (expensive) nappy collection services don’t seem to operate outside London.  Besides my son got appalling nappy rash which is not aided by reusables.     You can get unbleached, biodegradable disposable nappies - they were better, but still not as absorbant as the planet-killers…

We could eat less meat and dairy – cows in particular produce methane and contribute to global warning but if we’re still doing so in the full knowledge that we greatly increase our risk of bowel cancer through ham, sausages and other processed meats I suspect militant vegetarianism to save the planet is on a hiding to nothing.

Even when it’s made easy, we don’t do it – the fuss about changing over to more sustainable lightbulbs shows that even simple changes that can make a big difference still don’t have full public support – although we’ve been using them for years in my house and have got used to the idea of them “warming up”.

As for planning and land use, local councils need to sort out their recycling policy to cover plastics (not good enough to say that its uneconomical to recycle plastics because oil is a finite resource and if we don’t start reusing we’ll run out) and while I know new-build environmental standards are high, rainwater harvesting and solar panels ought to be mandatory just like decent insulation… more on this soon.

So we need Copenhagen to succeed because deep down, most people are inherently small “c” conservative and won’t change unless they’re persuaded that there’s something wrong with what they were doing before that is now unpalatable to them.  Bottom up does sometimes need the support of top down.