The Globe and Mail
Monday, Dec. 14, 2009 3:53AM EST

While politicians negotiate, executives take action
By: Eric Reguly

Corporate honchos aren’t waiting for treaties and legislation, they’re changing the way they do business to make climate change part of their legacy.

The Bella Center, the size of a big-city airport, is climate change’s ground zero. Some 30,000 participants swarm into the convention buildings every day. The mob includes some of the planet’s brightest scientific, technical, development, economic and political minds, from paleoclimatologists, who can tell you what the weather was like 100,000 years ago, to Chinese negotiators who know as much about U.S. carbon cap-and-trade “architecture” as many U.S. senators.

I have been immersed in the Bella Center’s phonebook-thick climate-change program for a week, sprinting from one meeting to another, talking to delegates from countries I never heard of and watching the daily green-group spectacle with a mixture of awe (where do they get the energy to walk around dressed as trees?) and fatigue (enough already, we get the point).

Yet in spite of the Bella Center’s chaos, energy and awesome collection of talent, I feel oddly detached from the whole thing. I feel that the Copenhagen summit, where supposedly nothing less than Earth’s survival is at stake, is a sideshow, a smokescreen, a diversion to the real story. I think the real story – climate change’s centre of gravity – is not here. But if not here, where?

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