...The focus would need to shift to regions, countries, organisations, groups such as the Large Cities Climate Leadership Group, known as the C-40 cities, and individuals.
In the absence of an agreement to reduce CO² emissions, individual commitments from organisations, companies and people also become more important. Looking close to home at just one example, power and automation technologies company ABB, as a global group active in more than 100 countries, has committed to cutting its own emissions — investing in areas such smart grid communications, data-centre power optimisation and wind-farm efficiency, as well as developing technologies that help customers to do more with less.
Far-sighted governments, regions and trade blocs have been saving for a long time. Between 1973 and 2004 in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 56% less energy was used than without energy savings measures. This saving corresponds to the production of 2500 new nuclear power plants (there are only 440 nuclear power plants in the world today).
But a comparison of productivity improvements from 1960 to 2000 by management consultant McKinsey shows that energy productivity has lagged far behind material and labour productivity, which means the potential for much higher energy savings.
The IEA indicates that a 20% reduction...
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Cont... See also:
http://rmi.org/ReinventingFire http://rmi.org/rfexecutivesummary Reinventing Fire Executive Summary
Digging up and burning the deposits of ancient sunlight stored eons ago in primeval swamps has transformed human existence and made industrial and urban civilization possible. However, those roughly four cubic miles of fossil fuels every year are no longer the only, best, or even cheapest way to sustain and expand the global economy—whether or not we count fossil fuels’ hidden costs.
Those “external” costs, paid not at the fuel pump or electric meter but in our taxes, wealth, and health, are not counted in the Reinventing Fire analysis, but are disturbingly large. Tens of billions of taxpayer dollars each year subsidize America’s fossil fuels, and even more flow to the systems that burn those fuels, distorting market choices by making the fuels look far cheaper than they really are. But the biggest hidden costs are economic and military.
America’s seemingly two-billion-dollar-a-day oil habit actually costs upwards of three times that much—six billion dollars a day, or a sixth of GDP. That’s due to three kinds of hidden costs, each about a half-trillion dollars per year: the macro economic costs of oil dependence, the microeconomic costs of oil-price volatility, and the military costs of forces whose primary mission is intervention in the Persian Gulf. Those military costs are about ten times what we pay to buy oil from the Persian Gulf, and rival total defense spending at the height of the Cold War.
Any costs to health, safety, environment, security of energy supply, world stability and peace, or national independence or reputation are extra. Coal, too, has hidden costs, chiefly to health, of about $180–530 billion per year, and natural gas had lesser but nontrivial externalities even before shale-gas “fracking” emerged.
All fossil fuels, to varying degrees, also incur climate risks that ...
http://rmi.org/rfexecutivesummary 
