Two Pittsburgh attorneys who specialize in environmental issues will participate in the United Nations summit on climate change in Copenhagen, where they expect world leaders to come up with a significant framework for a plan on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Jennifer Smokelin and Lawrence Demase, both with Pittsburgh-based law firm Reed Smith, are traveling to Copenhagen, Denmark, as delegates of the Environmental Markets Association, a U.S. trade group that focuses on finding market-based solutions to climate change issues.

Both are hopeful that at least an interim plan to address greenhouse gas reduction will be sealed by the end of the conference. That appears more likely, they said, because President Barack Obama postponed plans to attend the conference from this week to Dec. 18 when the event wraps up.

"With the president moving his attendance to next week with all the other world leaders at the end of the conference, it signifies that our administration expects to come out with an international agreement," Ms. Smokelin said yesterday during a phone interview from Atlanta where she was waiting for a flight to Copenhagen.

She will attend the first week of the conference, and Mr. Demase is scheduled to arrive Monday for the second week. Both attorneys represent large industrial companies with a significant stake in climate issues as well as emerging green technology businesses.

In Copenhagen, they will attend daily briefings for the nongovernment trade groups to learn the status of the talks, attend sessions focused on their clients' interests and then report back to Environmental Markets Association officials in the United States.

They also plan to write daily blog posts for Reed Smith.

In her first post yesterday, Ms. Smokelin said the four main issues to watch were: the degree to which industrialized nations will reduce their greenhouse gas emissions; how much developing countries including India and China will limit their emissions; how much financial assistance will be committed to developing countries for emission reduction; and how that financial assistance will be managed.

Besides practicing environmental law, Ms. Smokelin teaches a course on climate change to law, engineering and business students at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

Mr. Demase has practiced environmental law for nearly 40 years with much of his focus on cases related to the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Superfund program through which the federal government cleans up hazardous waste sites.

He expects to work with a committee in Copenhagen that will draft the final plan for climate change -- "to the extent there is a final plan."

"Originally, I thought this [conference] would result in an actual treaty," he said. "It looks like it will stop short of that .... But it looks like there will be a framework and one the United States could work with."

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