Daily Archives: March 5, 2007

It’s not just about climate

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Ahmed Djoghlaf, head of the UN biodiversity convention cautions that there are other issues that need to be considered apart from Climate Change and there are benefits in dealing all of them together.

This growing recognition of the seriousness of climate change is entirely to be welcomed, and in fact is long overdue.

It should not, however, eclipse another equally pressing crisis humanity has brought upon itself: the biggest reduction in the variety of life on Earth since the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

My main argument, however, is one of hope: by taking determined action to ease the pressures on the planet’s ecosystems, we have it within our power to reduce and even eliminate some of the worst threats posed by a warmer and less stable climate.

Protecting tropical forests and their enormous diversity of life not only helps to reduce carbon emissions, but also conserves vital water resources that will become increasingly precious due to climate change.

As the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment pointed out in 2005, reduction of biodiversity implies a threat to services as basic as the provision of food, fibre, medicines and fresh water, the pollination of crops and protection from flooding – and with the rural poor most directly dependent on these services, human development goals are also placed in jeopardy.

Even though more problems may seem daunting it is important to realise that we need to solve all of them. As in Climate Change, it brings about opportunities and threats.

The Climate Profiteers

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Joel Makower writes an amazing post about the growing “climate profiteers”.

Now that a growing corps of corporations are mustering the moxie to actually view climate change as an opportunity as well as a challenge, the complaint is something entirely different:

Big business is engaging in climate profiteering!

The reality is that a good many large corporations stand to gain mightily from likely and imminent U.S. national climate policies, however timid they may be. We’ve already seen that in Europe, where the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme has produced winners (and losers). And in the be-careful-what-you-wish-for category, some of these companies aren’t, suffice to say, environmentalists’ heroes.

All of which is driven home in a recent investment advisory from Citigroup Research, part of the Citigroup financial empire. The 120-page report, titled “Climatic Consequences” (Download – PDF)

As I said, the 74 companies named by Citi as positioned to benefit from climate change trends aren’t all darlings of the environmental set. True, the list includes more than a dozen companies in the solar, wind, and biogas energy business (such as Conergy, Evergreen Solar, Ormat, Q Cells, and SunPower), but also utilities dependent on nuclear power (Constellation Energy, Electricité de France, Entergy, Exelon), which “are well positioned in the long run, compared to operators of ‘dirty’ coal-fired plants.” And biotech companies like DuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta, whose products “offer the potential for greater ethanol yields.” Some of the companies operate largely behind the scenes, less familiar to the public, such as BorgWarner, whose key products offer the benefits of higher fuel efficiency and lower emissions from internal combustion engines; Johnson Controls, which operates in automotive and building efficiency; and Emerson, whose business units offer a wide range of energy-efficient technologies.

This post by Joel explains why Business can be the solution to the problem of climate change and sustainability. And with providing a solution to a problem comes profit which provides the incentive to create a solution in the first place. We want more “climate profiteers”.

VCs and Green Policy

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Todd Woody on the Green Wombat writes about the increasing role of Venture Capitalists in the lobbying for a better policy in Washington.

The discussion these days is about how Silicon Valley venture capitalists can replicate in Washington, D.C., their behind-the-scenes success in getting California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to enact the nation’s first greenhouse gas emissions cap.

“Suddenly, the venture capital industry has become so involved. This is critical because to a very large extent these are policy-driven markets,” said Christopher Flavin, president of the Worldwatch Institute, a non-profit environmental research organization based in Washington. “I’ve been surprised at just how aggressive and assertive leaders in the venture capitalist community in California are. I’ve been at a number of meetings with venture capitalists where I thought I was talking to someone from Greenpeace. They’re aggressive and willing to go knock on doors. Some of my environmentalist colleagues in Washington seem conservative compared to some VCs. We may be at some kind of tipping point.”