Cleantech 2008 Annual Review

While I have been busy attending conferences surrounding Earth Day, on April 22, The Cleantech Group has released their 2008 Annual Review on Cleantech investment available here. Meanwhile I am preparing an article to summarize the key conclusions of the lectures I attended, which should be posted shortly.

Additionally looking ahead, over April 28-30, 2009, more than 350 leaders of the clean technology sector, representing trillions of Euros in capital, together with investors, corporates, policy-makers, entrepreneurs and CEOs of sector leading companies, will convene in Copenhagen for Cleantech Forum XXII at the Radisson SAS Scandinavia.

Clean technology is first and foremost about resource efficiency. In these challenging economic times, clean technology has the potential to offer economic growth, job creation and excellent investment opportunities, to solve real problems and cut costs.

Cleantech Forum

The Next Wave

The term Anthropocene is used by some scientists to describe the most recent period in the Earth's history. It has no precise start date, but may be considered to start in the late 18th century when the activities of humans first began to have a significant global impact on the Earth's climate and ecosystems.

The Earth at night, a simulated night-time image of the world during the anthropocene.

Concurrently, modern economic thought emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries as the western world began its transformation from an agrarian to an industrial society.

Despite the enormous differences between then and now, the economic problems with which society struggles remain the same:

• How do we decide what to produce with our limited resources?
• How do we ensure stable prices and full employment of our resources?
• How do we provide a rising standard of living both for ourselves and for future generations?

With resources becoming scarcer, it is necessary to have correct price signals to ensure the most efficient allocation of resources to maximize social welfare.

Progress in economic thought toward answers to these questions tends to take discrete steps rather than to evolve smoothly over time. A new school of ideas suddenly emerges as changes in the economy yield fresh insights and make existing doctrines obsolete. The new school eventually becomes the consensus view, to be pushed aside by the next wave of new ideas.

This process continues today and its motivating force remains the same as that three centuries ago: to understand the economy so that we may use it wisely to achieve society's goals.

Climate change is, Lord Nicholas Stern argues, the biggest example of market failure we will ever see. If you thought government bail-outs were giving financiers an easy way out, look at the free ride we have been given over our climate-killing consumption patterns. “When we emit greenhouse gases we damage the prospects for others and, unless appropriate policy is in place, we do not bear the costs of the damage,” Stern writes in his new book, A Blueprint for a Safer Planet. “Markets then fail in the sense that their main co-ordinating mechanism – prices – give the wrong signals.”

Stern’s prescriptions for a low-carbon future include putting a price on carbon, investing in renewable energy, and providing funding for poor countries to keep their forests intact.

Then and now. Glacier in Patagonia, Argentina 1928. Glacier in Pategonia, Argentina 2004. 76 years of climate change.

Perhaps the experience of bailing out the banks will persuade them that an early market intervention for the climate may avoid an even more disastrous bust in the future.

Lord Nicholas Stern will present an outline of his new book, A Blueprint for a Safer Planet, which describes how to manage climate change while creating a new era of growth and prosperity.

FREE Event at LSE - Lord Nicholas Stern: A Blueprint for a Safer Planet

The future, if we fail to act.