More and more people accept that we need emergency action to achieve a safe climate. The Copenhagen Summit in December will be a dramatic opportunity for governments to show whether or not they are prepared to be part of the solution.
There are several possible outcomes from the Copenhagen Summit.
The most necessary outcome, but almost impossible, is a real global agreement to take emergency action. This might include timelines for drastic reductions in carbon emissions, with the governments of the major economies legislating the speed of reduction, massively funding renewable energy investment, and donating large amounts of cash and training to poorer countries to help them achieve similar goals.
There would still be a lot of detail to work out, but the debate would then have moved on from "Should something be done?" to "What should be done?" to "How do we do this (fairly)?".
Big corporations reliant on carbon pollution, or indeed on the stability of the capitalist economy, would be incredibly upset by such an outcome and are hard at work right now to make sure it stays in the "impossible" category.
The second possible outcome is there is no agreement at all. This is a situation Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and US President Barack Obama want to avoid, because it would probably result in a dramatic increase in the power of the climate movement as masses of people demand serious action.
So the third possibility, which Rudd and Obama and other capitalist leaders are working hard to achieve, is that an agreement is reached that looks good enough but changes relatively little.
There are three main areas in which a potential agreement at Copenhagen might look shonky.
First, what actual targets (if any) will be agreed for carbon emissions reduction and how will they be backed up by specific national targets?
Second, will those targets be legislated directly in each nation or will they be indirect, relying on something like a global emissions trading scheme, effectively an international market for polluters?
Third, will the biggest capitalist economies pay for emissions reductions in the rest of the world? For example, African countries are asking for $67 billion per year from 2020 onwards in climate reparations.
Without real progress in these three areas, a Copenhagen agreement would not achieve much. But neither Rudd nor Obama appear to want substantial progress in any of these areas.
On September 24, Obama made a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in which he recognised that the developed nations have caused most of the climate damage and should take responsibility for fixing the problem. This is a definite improvement on the position of the previous US government.
Fidel Castro said of Obama's speech: "It was certainly a brave gesture … The problem now is that everything he has said contradicts what the United States has been doing for over 150 years."
However, Obama made no specific statements about emissions targets or other areas under negotiation at Copenhagen, and the legislation that Obama and his allies are putting to the US government does not look likely to do very well on the essential points.
In his turn, Rudd told the UN: "What the world needs is a grand bargain between the developed world and the developing world in order to reach an outcome for the planet as a whole". Sounds good and it is certainly true enough. But the devil is in the detail.
Rudd's grand bargain actually amounts to agreement to not do much at all. China will not have to agree to any specific emissions reductions, nor will it (or any poorer nation) get financial support from the major capitalist economies to do anything. In return, the US and Australia will adopt only very weak emissions targets, and completely abstract and ineffective mechanisms to reach those targets.
It looks likely the Copenhagen Summit will be the focus of protests in many big cities around the world, a recognition by climate activists that a shallow agreement at Copenhagen will do nothing to assail the risk of catastrophic climate change.