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This September some remarkable breakthroughs occurred in climate protection — almost enough to balance the grim news on the scientific front indicating rapidly thinning Arctic sea ice and acceleration of deglaciation in Greenland.

The promising signs include India’s announcement of willingness to commit to greenhouse limits and adoption of a domestic cap and trade plan for energy efficiency in eight industry sectors; massive investments by China in wind and solar energy; and an announcement by Japan that it will commit to reduce its greenhouse emissions 25 percent below current levels by 2020. The Republic of Korea’s Green New Deal stimulus package, launched in January, had already disbursed 20 percent of the $38.1 billion pledged for 2009-2012. Indonesia has also indicated the potential for cuts in carbon emissions of 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 through reductions in deforestation, peat land degradation and energy consumption.

Despite this progress, the outlook is not auspicious for a sweeping North-South emissions accord by the conclusion of this December’s Copenhagen Climate Conference. Different perceptions by developed and developing countries over historic emissions, per capita emissions and emissions growth complicate near term efforts to get a deal on CO2. Yet, the overall outlook for global emissions reduction is more promising if we look past the negotiations to what is actually happening as a global competition develops to dominate emerging low carbon energy fields.

Just as it became clear that cap-and-trade climate legislation was facing rough going in the US Senate and would be unlikely to be enacted before the Copenhagen conference, environmental visionary Lester Brown reported the startling news that US energy sector carbon emissions had dropped 9 percent from 2007 to summer 2009.

In a few other instances in the last generation significant reductions in greenhouse emissions occurred quickly in major industrial countries. In Britain the National Union of Mineworkers went on strike in March 1984 against the prime minister’s efforts to close some inefficient coal mines; when the strike ended a year later the union was broken and Margaret Thatcher managed to move the Britain’s electricity base to natural gas, much coming from the North Sea. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification the next year of Germany led to a closure of highly inefficient factories in the East and a dramatic drop in overall German greenhouse emissions. Closing of some greatly inefficient factories and forcing individuals and industry to pay for energy consumed following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 resulted in a sharp drop in greenhouse emissions.

Yet, unlike these moves produced by political upheaval, the sharp drop in US emissions may be a harbinger of a profound change in perception by industry, investors and consumers of the need to adopt a more environmentally sustainable path. Much of the drop appears attributable to shifts throughout the economy to a lower carbon path with new coal plants becoming as difficult to finance and license as nuclear plants have been since the Three Mile Island accident, wind emerging as a large-scale power technology, and greater use of a range of renewable and efficiency systems.

Already there are signs in China of a similar concerted effort to move toward a low-carbon economy. Fed partly by perceptions of vulnerability to climate change and the air and water pollution associated with coal burning, this Chinese thrust may be driven even more by a desire to be pre-eminent in such technologies as solar, wind and carbon capture and storage related to fossil fuel burning. It is likely that such change is underway in India, Japan, Korea and many other countries and driven by competitiveness concerns as much as environmental commitment.

It is important to sustain investors’ and entrepreneurs’ perceptions that there will be a price to pay for emitting greenhouse gases and heat-trapping particles, so it is vital that progress occur at Copenhagen. It is equally crucial, however, to pay much greater attention to short-lived greenhouse gases such as methane and heat-trapping particles whose reduction could result in near term cuts in the radiative forcing that drives climate change. It is vital to develop a Global Warming Potential for black carbon that would facilitate investment in cleaner cookstoves, retrofitted two-stroke engines and much cleaner trucks. A shift to a 20-year rather than 100-year time frame for GWP calculations in trading could result in steep drops in radiative forcing that threatens to cause climate change to move past irreversible tipping points. Building these win-win strategies into a climate deal would ensure that a climate treaty would have a lasting effect.

John Topping Jr. is president of the Washington, DC-based Climate Institute. This article originally appeared on www.cleantechasiaonline.com.