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News & Views From the Front Line
Wednesday, 24 March 2010
What's a Green Investment Bank?
With today's UK Governmental budget expected to be all doom and gloom, one green diamond in the murk could be Mr Darling's well trailed Green Investment Bank. If you, like me, are wondering what such a bank might look like and operate, the Guardian has a useful compendium of opinions here. We shall have to wait and see what Mr Darling has in his red box...Labels: banking, economics, finance, investment
# posted by Gareth Kane : 10:03
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Thursday, 1 October 2009
Green jobs in a green economy?
There's an interesting article on Fast Company giving three estimations of the potential for new green jobs by 2020:- 2.7m in the EU according to Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council (EREC)
- 10m globally according to the Climate Group
- 30m globally according to the Global Climate Network (actually 40m new jobs but 10m lost 'brown' jobs)
So plenty of jobs, even if the estimations vary widely. The latter two depend on China going green big time, which it claims it will do but there is a lack of clarity over how this will happen in practice.
There has always been a lot of confusion and blether about how to create green jobs. People build centres of excellence (can you create a centre of excellence?) and green business parks (most of which fail, but that's another story), but there is only one thing which will make a difference.
Renewable energy capacity in the UK surged 19% in 2008 and global renewables investment exceeded that in fossil fuels for the first time ever. Create that sort of demand and the supply and the jobs will follow. The rest, at best, will just facilitate change, not drive it.
Labels: investment, jobs, low carbon economy
# posted by Gareth Kane : 13:32
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Monday, 8 June 2009
Green Energy Investment Overtakes Fossil Fuels
In 2008 wind, solar and other clean technologies attracted $140bn (£85bn) compared with $110bn for gas and coal for electrical power generation (source: Guardian). There was a slight drop in investment at the start of 2009, but this is apparently recovering.Given this background, it makes the decision by many 'big oil' companies to pull out of renewables an odd one. I'm sticking with my prediction that they will become the vacuum tube manufacturers of the 21st Century - the fossilised energy industry.
Labels: investment, oil industry, renewable energy
# posted by Gareth Kane : 09:26
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Wednesday, 2 July 2008
A good time to go green
Things have settled down here a little at Terra Infirma Towers after the most busy (and it has to be said lucrative) month in our history. I've said before that with companies feeling the pinch from falling orders and soaring oil prices, this is not a bad time to be offering cost-cutting services. The great thing about cutting material resource use, as opposed to human resources (hate that term), is that it doesn't cut your capacity to deliver products and/or services so as the economy recovers you're not floundering behind.Of course companies can go beyond simply reducing environmental costs and start exploiting environmental business opportunities. Now you might think that this is a risky time to do so, but both the Guardian and the Times are reporting a surge in green investment and I hear the same from contacts in the banking industry.
Just don't think you can stick a green label on a duff product and expect it to succeed. Plenty have tried and failed. And I keep meeting more of them.
Labels: energy efficiency, green business, investment, waste minimisation
# posted by Gareth Kane : 12:26
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Friday, 29 February 2008
Clean Energy Investment Booms
New Energy Finance is reporting that "Clean" energy investment almost hit $150bn last year - up 60% on the year before.Their press release states:
Among the key factors pushing this numbers sharply upwards in 2007 were government policies around the world to promote renewable power and cleaner fuels, oil prices approaching $100-a barrel and rising corporate and investor awareness of the opportunities in clean energy.
One of the themes of 2007 was geographic diversification. Western Europe and North America continued to enjoy sharp increases... but the momentum spread out to include other developed economic regions such as Eastern Europe and Australia.
Even more significant was the pick-up in activity in emerging economies, with China moving strongly ahead with projects in wind, biomass and energy efficiency, Brazil seeing huge investment interest in its sugar based ethanol sector, and Africa starting to see renewable energy and efficiency as partial answers to its power shortages.
Interesting stuff. Obviously the Low Carbon Economy is still in its infancy, but if investment continues to rise at this scale, markets will stabilise and the uptake of renewables and energy efficient technologies will start to become the norm, rather than the exception.
Labels: energy efficiency, investment, low carbon economy, renewable energy
# posted by Gareth Kane : 08:36
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A highly accessible, practical guide to those who want to introduce sustainability into their business or organization quickly and effectively.
