ABSTRACT
In December 2009, the attention of the world’s media turned to Copenhagen and the Summit to negotiate an agreement on international action on climate change. The Copenhagen Summit helped the world see how climate negotiations are not about preventing climate change. The focus of discussions of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has been about capping carbon emissions and mechanisms to trade permits to pollute the atmosphere with carbon. In the history of climate change policies the role of business has been inauspicious, given how large corporations mobilised throughout the 1990s to create uncertainty about the science of anthropogenic global warming. Groups such as the Climate Disclosure Project, the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, and the Business Leaders Initiative on Climate Change, bring together large swathes of the private sector that lobby privately and advocate publicly on the need for an intergovernmental agreement on climate change.
