A new realism has emerged. Climate change is no longer rejected as a bogus theory the economy can ill afford. Instead, it’s a business opportunity. -- Companies hide behind ‘trade associations' to side-step the bad PR they might invite for opposing measures to fight climate change. -- The American Petroleum Institute spent considerable energy last summer stimulating fake ‘grassroots' opposition to ACES. The Act has now been so weakened by concessions to big business that the NGO International Rivers estimates it could allow US companies to avoid actually reducing their emissions until 2026. Now, with the US climate debate bogged down in the Senate, negotiators are rapidly talking down expectations for a strong climate agreement at Copenhagen. Companies hide behind ‘trade associations' to side-step the bad PR they might invite for opposing measures to fight climate change. -- The American Petroleum Institute spent considerable energy last summer stimulating fake ‘grassroots' opposition to ACES. The Act has now been so weakened by concessions to big business that the NGO International Rivers estimates it could allow US companies to avoid actually reducing their emissions until 2026. Now, with the US climate debate bogged down in the Senate, negotiators are rapidly talking down expectations for a strong climate agreement at Copenhagen. This is not the first time that business has had a defining impact on humanity's attempts to get to grips with the enormous challenge of climate change One often-repeated claim is that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are equivalent wherever they take place - which is only true up to a point. - It is worth stressing that offsets are not reductions. In practice, ‘offsetting' allows generous subsidies for existing technologies to mop up industrial gases, rather than stimulating the speedy shift toward the low carbon world we desperately need. As of September 2009, three-quarters of the offset credits being traded had nothing to do with CO2 reductions. Instead, they were for large firms, operating in developing countries, making minor technical adjustments to eliminate HFCs (refrigerant gases) and N2O (a by-product of synthetic fibre production). - Corporations and governments in the North then buy these credits to avoid taking action domestically. -- This flawed assumption - that the market can effectively drive the transition to more sustainable models of development - also underlies one of the major new initiatives on the table for agreement at Copenhagen: the proposal to curb deforestation, known as REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation).