It’s All About the Money in Copenhagen

It's all about the money these last days in the Danish capital and one key question is being asked: How on earth do you build and finance a robust and credible global carbon market? On buses, in hallways, in long lines outside the Bella Center, participants are all talking about the explosion in financing and carbon trading that is needed to dramatically reduce the pollution causing climate change.

The "financing" part is easy to understand: We need more spending on carbon-reducing activities, a lot more spending. Significantly more public and private financing is needed to deploy energy-saving, low-carbon technologies on the global scale needed. And 85 to 90 percent of that financing will need to be from private sources such as investment banks, public pension funds and other global investors who control many trillions of dollars.