Climate Change – another step closer

Following my presentation at Eurofoo on 19th Sept 2006, things have been moving along in “interesting ways”. It’s always frustrating not having enough time and wading through a lot of politics/copyright/etc, but we’re getting very close to making our first proper announcements (watch this space).

There’s going to be a huge amount of activity over the coming months and I’ll be updating this blog more frequently in a more open way, once a couple more bits of jigsaw are in place – Lincon’s “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe” quote springs to mind, although in this case we’re not chopping the trees down.

One of the interesting areas I’ve been catapulted into has been in the area of “donations”, and how they should be used. Given that Man Group are one of the funders of Global Cool, and the GC board include Dr Steve Howard of the Climate Group; Dr Richard Tipper of the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management; James Cameron, Chairman of Climate Change Capital; it’s been amazing to work with some of the most knowledgable people in the field.

I was honoured, therefore, to be nominated Chairman of the Executive Committee to work out how donations should be used. This has involved a massive amount of learning on my part to really try and understand how the (controversial) Carbon Markets work, what goes well, what goes wrong, what the ‘least bad’ options are… and what messages should be sent out to the investment communities if they are looking to invest $trillions into renewable energies over the next decade.

The d::gen team have also been working hard on the “Carbon Calculator” project that I spoke of at Eurofoo and we’ll be making announcements about that over the next few weeks. Remember, we will release any useful software at least under a General Public License (ie. free) and any content under a Creative Commons “attribution, non-commercial, share-alike