The World Future Energy Summit (WFES) has just been held in Abu Dhabi. This was the third time it has been held, and the event attracts an impressive array of speakers; it is the only event I have been to that has a panel just for royalty! More significant, of course, was the array of sixteen national energy ministers who attended and much of the discussion was, inevitably, an analysis of the outcome of the Copenhagen conference.

As well as sessions on policy and politics, there were impressive headline speakers on matters architectural, including Richard Rogers and Stefen Lehmann whose book on Green Urbanism we are looking forward to publishing later this year.

There’s a lot of detailed analysis both of the results from Copenhagen, and of the talks at the WFES elsewhere on the web and so little point in regurgitating that. I was actually particularly struck by a couple of comments from the speakers that I heard. The first was the fairly obvious point from the Kuwait oil minister, frustrated at being painted as a villain of the piece; we just produce the oil, he said – it’s consumed elsewhere, particularly in the West, and that is where the emissions actually occur. Surely, responsibility should lie with consumers, not producers.

The second were the closing remarks to the talk from Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the IPCC and another of the keynote speakers at the event, much in the spotlight recently. Concluding his comments on where we are in the fight against global warming and that 'business as usual is not an option', he looked at what the next steps should be. Alongside all the political activity, he reminded the audience of the importance of spreading knowledge and information about the whole subject of climate changed, as a better informed community will be better placed to make well-informed decisions. While subsequent events might give an ironic twist to the comment, that, I thought, is precisely what we are here to do!