Climate-change conference set in Tupper Lake

March 28, 2008 04:00 am

— TUPPER LAKE -- A major conference is planned in Tupper Lake to identify actionable solutions to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States.
Scheduled for June 25 and 26 at the Wild Center, the conference will convene business leaders and experts on climate-change economics, carbon finance, selected emissions sectors and the carbon sink in the United States.
Participants are expected to produce a slate of possible options to overcome barriers that are inhibiting implementation of greenhouse-gas-emission reductions.
"We know ways exist to materially cut greenhouse-gas emissions," Conference Co-Chair Carter Bales said in a news release. "What we do not yet know is the policy and regulatory framework that can kick-start these solutions so they take hold across the U.S. economy."
Bales was a member of the McKinsey & Company team that recently published the report "Reducing U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions: How Much at What Cost?", which identifies ways to cut U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions by up to 28 percent with positive impact on the U.S. economy.
"We finally have the facts in hand to move against greenhouse-gas emissions in an economically sensible way," Bales said.
"Achieving these reductions at the lowest cost to the economy will require coordinated economy-wide action, which is why we are assembling this group of climate leaders to work on the task."
The conference is by invitation only and will be limited to 125 participants.
"Many past conferences have focused on identifying the problem and its causes," said Ross Whaley, the other conference co-chair. "This is not another of those conferences. This conference centers on finding the U.S. solution."
Robert Socolow, Princeton University physicist and co-director of that college's Carbon Mitigation Initiative, called the conference "a serious opportunity to prove we can start to get ideas into the market. We are going to go beyond the theory that this will work and into the reality of making it work."
More than 70 major businesses and organizations are scheduled to participate.
Conference partners include New York state, the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Geographic Society, Pew Center on Global Climate Change, Yale School of Environment and Forestry, the U.S. Green Building Council, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the American Museum of Natural History.
For more information about the conference, check the Web site www.usclimateaction.org.
For information on the McKinsey Report, see www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/ccsi/greenhousegas.asp.

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