What goes on Tuesday stays on Tuesday

There's an old saying in England - what goes on tour, stays on tour - and some of the stuff that went on on Tuesday was commercially sensitive. As a result, the story of Tuesday is a bit dull for the simple reason that I need to exercise some sensible self-censorship and not give away commercial secrets.

The day began with our morning briefing, where our senior execs would revise the schedule for the day ahead. At 1030 we were due to meet with one of the most senior environmental policy executives in the World, X, the leader of Organisation Y. Then at 1pm there was the CDP event where our CTO was due to speak. Despite the massive mayhem of yesterday and the colder weather that was pressing in, there was no reason to shake up the schedule for today so we stuck to plan A.

Our meeting with X was due to happen in a very beautiful old mansion house, on the side of a Copenhagen square. We got there a bit early, and as luck would have it arrived at exactly the same moment as X. She ushered us into her office, a magnificent set of rooms with a beautiful view overlooking the square. As far as I could tell was bigger than the flat that I'm trying to buy in London. London property prices are a killer ... The square was filled with exhibits about the environment, so we were looking down on a collection of satellites, huge photos of the beauty of the environment, and graphs of the nightmare scenarios of global temperature rises. Her top team of four directors - who were also around for the COP - joined us.

The conversations opened with discussion of the COP. All of Organisation Y's team were exhausted, having worked late into the night on many nights working the negotiations. All of them had even bigger bags under their eyes than I did. Under the circumstances, it was incredibly generous of them to give us an hour and a half of their time. At this stage, they all still felt that there would be a good agreement out of the COP.

The long and the short of our meeting with X (and really all that I can say) was that we found we had a lot in common both between our general work and the innovations work I'm leading in our business and the things Organisation Y are planning for the future, and given that organisation's enormous influence that is very promising indeed.

From there we went to Crowne Plaza hotel for the Carbon Disclosure Project we were sponsoring. This was well attended and our CTO did a good job of getting our point of view across to the assembled delegates. The points we were trying to get across all seem a bit academic, but are important. Because there are growing numbers of environmental rules and regulations, the administrative and measurement costs of meeting these are growing to the point where for big organisations just reporting the numbers to environmental agencies can run into millions of euros/pounds/dollars per year. And our point is that there are some tricks of the trade that can be applied to cut these costs and make your reporting more reliable at the same time, and we happen to know quite a lot about these tricks.

The other point we made was that the trend towards using accounting methodologies to address environmental problems is probably unwise. Accounting methods are designed to keep track of money that can be counted in pounds, shillings and pence, to an accuracy of pence even in huge organisations. Keeping track of money to this level of accuracy is essential for any organisation.

But this approach is total overkill for environmental reporting. For two decades, scientists have been working on methods of accounting for greenhouse gases, ozone destroying substances, air and water pollution, etc etc and these are methods that are based on a thorough understanding that the substances involved are very hard to quantify or keep track of through the "food chain" that is our economy. The methods are based on transparency and verification to reduce uncertainties, not based on penny-by-penny tracking of resources, and cost far, far less to implement than accounting type solutions.

Anyway, these ideas went down well. Our event ended and the rest of the team headed back to our hotel, while I took my final chance to take in the COP before leaving the next day. Prince Charles was due to be speaking at the plenary session at 5pm, so myself and a friend who was also at the COP thought we might be able to blag our way into the event ....

... we were turned away in no uncertain terms by security. Oh well, if you don't try, you never know. :)

The rest of the day was spent in a bit of networking, then heading to bed early. The long day was over.