After one week of little progress at the UN climate talks in Cancun, Mexico, Chinese negotiators have offered a proposal that some analysts are calling a “game-changer.”
According to reports from Reuters, Xinhua News Agency and other media outlets, China is working to encourage developed
China, which last year walked away from COP 15 without agreeing to anything, now wants to hold its own climate talks.
The talks, scheduled for October, according to the UN’s top environmental official, Achim Steiner, will take place in the northern Chinese port of Tianjin, northwest of Beijing.
Government officials around the industrialized world are hoping that the Tianjin talks will pave the way for a new, binding, climate change treaty after COP 15’s
In spite of leaps and bounds in technology, investment capital, political support and public will over the past decade – much less the past year – there is one element of a revolution that has not emerged in the clean tech movement: an icon. Sure, standard-bearers of the green movement that began in the 1960’s are still visible and active and there are brilliant scientists, entrepreneurs and politicians out there who might be candidates. But, as greens cast about for their own JFK in government, or a Green Gates in the private sector, what they really need is their own Green Gandhi. He may be emerging.