Investors Concur that Pricing Carbon is Needed to Boost Green Tech. By Bryan Walsh, Time, January 15, 2010. "If there's a secret weapon buried in the Copenhagen Accord, it's this: governments will not act alone but will vigorously engage the business world. 'We can only meet this challenge,' says Todd Stern, America's top climate envoy, 'if we can generate sustained, long-term investment in the clean-energy economy.' That was the main message behind the one-day Investor Summit on Climate Risk at the U.N. on Jan. 14. The event connected green luminaries like Al Gore with the unfamous people who direct hundreds of billions in private investment. This was the fourth annual summit, but it may have been the most fortuitously timed of the lot -- occurring after Copenhagen, before the U.S. Senate begins its real work on climate legislation this year and just as investors begin to climb out of the recession. The feeling at the session was hopeful -- investors, especially large-scale institutional funds that need to worry about the long term, are ready to bet on cutting carbon -- but impatient.
"The key, as many of them see it, is a policy that would make carbon more expensive, leveling the playing field so that competing technologies like wind and solar can gain traction. 'We had a good start at Copenhagen, but we're still without a very clear goal, without clear carbon caps, without a price on carbon,' says Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres, a national network of major institutional investors and public-interest groups... The International Energy Agency estimates that more than $10 trillion in investment will be needed over the next 20 years to support a global transition to a lower-carbon economy. We're nowhere near that -- Lubber says that $140 billion was invested globally in renewable and low-carbon technologies last year, a number that she estimates will rise to $190 billion this year."
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