The COP15 conference on climate change will be a success even if no deal comes out of it, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said on Tuesday in Copenhagen.

“It depends on what your definition of a deal is,” Schwarzenegger told the media. “The important thing is to move the agenda forward.”

The governor is in Copenhagen to participate in a number of events on the sidelines of the main conference. Before meeting with the media, Schwarzenegger delivered a speech to an audience of mostly non-governmental organization members on California’s climate change efforts and the important of leading from the grassroots level.

“The important issue that I’m here to address is to not go and just rely solely on the federal government and national governments,” he said afterward. “All great movements start from grassroots level.”

California leads the United States in its legal mandate to cut greenhouse gases that warm the planet, from auto mileage standards adopted by the rest of the nation to green building codes.

Schwarzenegger said the leaders in Copenhagen needed to listen more to “ordinary folks” and when asked if he really expected Africa to listen to California he said California has already been a leader in the area, having formed partnerships with other states, Canadian provinces and Chinese provinces to affect change from the ground up.

Having an integrated clean technology strategy will be a big part of winning  business in the 21st century, a Coca-Cola executive told Reuters.com on Monday, and its investments in refrigeration will likely have the biggest impact on that strategy long-term.

The world’s biggest soft drinks maker has hooked up with Greenpeace on an initiative to eliminate hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) — greenhouse gases with a high warming effect — from its refrigeration and cooling equipment by 2015, said Jeff Seabright, Coke’s vice president for Environment & Water Resources.

“We have about 10 million pieces of equipment that run in 200 countries around the world every day, and although we’re only 1 percent of the commercial refrigeration market we have an opportunity to really lead on this,” he said.

Coke is also investing indirectly to keep ahead of the curve on new frontier technologies.

Seabright said Coke has around $70 million in two clean tech venture capital funds, DJF Element and Rockport Capital and that, in addition to expecting better than market rate returns, such investments give it a front-row seat for the latest technologies.

“We’ve clearly identified sustainable not as a fad or as sort of a nice to-do; this is going to define what it means to win in the world of business in the 21st century,” he said. “Understanding things like sustainable agriculture, understanding what’s happening with water stress around the world in part as a product of climate-induced stress, understanding how to manage energy inputs and impacts on your business. These things are today big parts of our cost structure, a big part of our footprint and increasingly are going to a big part of what it’s going to take to win as a business.”

Water, packaging and energy and climate change are the three critical components of Coke’s environmental sustainability, Seabright said. One area it is now actively exploring is sustainable agriculture.

The debate over lowering greenhouse gas emissions is sometimes depicted as a fight between environmental groups concerned over the health of the planet and businesses concerned about economic growth and bottom-line erosion.

Occasionally, though, there is a meeting of like minds between the two.

The WWF has a program in which it partners with companies to target emissions reductions. The Climate Savers program is an agreement between the WWF and its partner companies to lay out targets and set out projects to meet those goals.

“We want to show that doing business and reducing emissions go hand in hand,” said Matthew Banks, a senior program officer at the WWF and an economist.

The program, started in 1999, is aimed at getting companies to reduce their carbon footprint. Twenty-three companies have signed on, including Coca-Cola, Hewlett-Packard, Nike and JohnsonDiversey. The companies negotiate targets and projects to reach those targets with the WWF and independent experts. Each contract is tailored to the company’s specific circumstances  and progress is verified by an outside experts like ecofys.

Hewlett-Packard,  for instance, has committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 6 million tonnes below 2005 levels by 2010.  Japanese transportation company Sagawa aims to reduce its gross CO2 emissions by 6 percent by 2012 compared with 2002.

The WWF is trying to get companies to stretch those targets.

Some businesses in the United States will have to reinvent themselves as the Obama administration moves to lower greenhouse gas emissions, but they’ll be  better off in the long run, Pedro Chidichimo, president of JohnsonDiversey EMA, told Reuters.com on Thursday.

Despite the inevitable short-term pain, Chidichimo said that carbon footprint reductions simply have good bottom-line implications for businesses.

“Of course there are a lot of investments that need to be done, not only financial investments but resources and capabilities investments that need to be done to do that but this will generate significant bottom-line improvement for the business landscape,” he said.

The Environment Protection Agency (EPA)  ruled on Monday that greenhouse gases endanger human health, a move that will allow it to regulate planet-warming gases even without legislation in Congress.

Reinvention will be key for some companies as they move to comply with new standards and regulations, said Chidichimo, who spoke to Reuters.com at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Climate Business Action Day event on the sidelines of the COP15 climate conference in Copenhagen.

“In history you’ve seen many reinventions of industries,” he said. “I think we are at one of those breakthrough times in humanity where some industries need to be redefined totally and need to take other technologies as a base to drive a different business model.”

Wisconsin-based JohnsonDiversey specializes in cleaning and hygiene solutions for commercial customers. The unlisted company has committed to reducing emissions from its global operations to 8 percent below 2003 levels by December 31, 2013. It said this will result in an estimated cumulative CO2 reduction of 89,000 tonnes by 2013.

In the most heated protest of these early days at COP15 in Copenhagen, African representatives accused the political leaders of the developed world of hijacking the conference to the detriment of developing nations.

The marchers said the process of the talks had been manipulated by the developed world’s political leaders to impose on Africans a deal that won’t benefit them.

Augustine Njmanshi, of Christian Aid, said Africans were suffering and would “not die in silence.”

He added: “$10 billion is not enough to buy the coffins to bury us with.”

The UN Conference on Climate Change is a weighty gathering of serious folks looking for a way to cut carbon emissions. It’s also a great place to bring some much-needed humor and along the way hammer a few perceived laggers in the fight against global warming.

Enter the Fossil of the Day Awards, a tongue-in-cheek dishonor first presented in 1999 and given to the countries with the worst performances at the previous day’s talks during UN climate conferences.

Three awards, compiled by CAN (Climate Action Network), a coalition of more than 450 NGOs, are presented each day with the country scoring the most points over the course of the conference winning the grand prize.

While the day’s winner seemed a bit anti-climactic — most of the gathered horde were expecting Saudi Arabia to come out in front — there were surprises for second and third.

Canada — nice, quiet, never-a-bad-thing-to-say-about-anyone Canada — found itself in the spotlight. The nation, whose stance on emissions targets has already irked environmentalists, came third. In a statement the organizers said Canada won after the country’s environment minister, Jim Prentice, said it “‘won’t be swayed’ by Copenhagen ‘hype’.”

Well, maybe it wasn’t that big a surprise.

Sweden, Finland and Austria captured second place “for backing a devious EU proposal to cook the books by not fully accounting for emissions from forest management.”

Walking through the Copenhagen airport, it’s pretty much impossible to miss the signs that illustrate the city’s focus is squarely on the climate. Those signs, literally, are everywhere, with advertisements adorning the walls on the walk from the flight ramp through to baggage claim and off into the arrivals area.

Big companies from Siemens to Shell are making sure you know they care.

Those are nice, but to really get a message across the big conglomerates may want to contact the ad guy for Greenpeace and its NGO alliance. The environment group has plastered the airport walls with a campaign “to mobilize civil society and to galvanize public opinion” to help bring about a new climate deal. The ad series features unflattering photos of world leaders like Germany’s Angela Merkel (pictured in the ad below), President Obama,  and others beside this quote: “We could have stopped catastrophic climate change” followed by the subtext “We did … nothing”. Whether you agree with the group and the alliance of NGOs participating in the ad, you gotta admit it’s pretty striking.

There was another ad from Accenture that caught my eye as I strolled toward the baggage claim area, although it had nothing to do with the climate conference.  I just like irony:

Ask anyone about climate change and you likely will get the kind of emotional response not seen since George W Bush left office. People on both sides of the debate – from politicians and scientists to your regular Joe on the street – are often adamantly in one camp or the other, with little wriggle room in between.

The majority of the camp believes that Mother Nature is indeed terribly sick, and that humankind is the virus that caused the disease. The symptoms are a climate that is warming to such a degree we are faced with certain calamity if we don’t do something about it.

Sounds alarming, doesn’t it?

On the other side, are the folks who say the climate is not warming at all or that, if it is, it is a natural phenomenon that will correct itself. In other words, Mother Nature can heal herself, if she’s even sick. To spend billions trying to do what Earth can do itself is folly, pure and simple, and will lead to economic ruin for many developing nations.

Sounds alarming, doesn’t it?

Al Gore’s Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth arguably raised the temperature on the debate by bringing a simple clear message to the masses. It sent shivers down spines on both sides – those on the “yay” side applauded it for setting out the data and evidence they claim are indisputable truths about global warming. NY Times reviewer David Edelstein called it “devastating in its implications”.  The naysayers derided it as a concoction that played fast and loose with the facts. (See National Geographic’s scorecard on the claims made in the film here )

Bjorn Lomborg , author of the “The Skeptical Environmentalist” and “Cool It” and one of the experts on the Reuters.com panel that will be answering our Question of the Day during the Copenhagen conference, doesn’t deny the climate is changing. He says that if saving people ultimately is the goal, then spend the money where it does the most good: eradicating poverty and bolstering economies in the developing world, which would have greater immediate impact than billions spent on big schemes that ultimately may do little.