Who will take the lead?

Yesterday I raised a question on how we get everyone to stick to the same solution to save the environment, thus our planet and ourselves. So far different countries seem to approach the climate situation differently, which the climate summit COP15 in Copenhagen was a clear indication of.  At the end of the summit I got a feeling that not all UN countries came to Copenhagen with the same agenda and therefore not the same willingness to put their signatures on an agreement.

And why was that? I had a feeling that after getting overexposed to climate facts – and in some situations propaganda – that every citizen of the planet understood that we had to find a way to deal with the issue.

But then after thinking about it for a while I realized that maybe not every citizen shared the same knowledge and/or concern about the climate change. In order to get everyone to support the same solution, the first part would evidently be to get everyone to understand the urgentness and severity of the problem. And how do we do that? If I had the answer to that question I probably wouldn’t be writing this blog in the first place, but trying to save the world from some hot spot office in a major city (or maybe from a flooded tent somewhere).

However, making a movie like Al Gore’s “An inconvenient truth” might not be such a bad idea. I know Bjørn Lomborg, who I discussed yesterday, is far from a fan of a campaign that scares people off, but Al Gore did get a lot of people to draw attention to the problem. If, at some point, citizens and governments realized the impact of the climate crisis, people would probably be less reluctant to have one governing institution trying to figure out a solution. And probably support the solution down the line.

United Nations tries to take the leadership of the war on climate warming, but has no real governing power. Who will then take the leadership as the problem becomes more urgent? A country? Another organization? Or maybe a completely new institution assembled for the very cause? Someone has to take the lead and it is a very interesting question who that will be.