The future’s bright, the future’s green!
In 2008 many green mutual funds and individual stocks lost up to 80% of their value but it seems that investors can now expect their portfolios to rise higher than the overall market as it recovers.
This may be, in no small part, due to numerous stimulus bills across the world providing more than $200 billion (£134 billion) in incentives and spending for renewable energy, energy efficient buildings, clean transportation and other green initiatives.
A recent survey found almost half of investors are now “more likely” or “much more likely” to increase their investment in clean energy than a year ago.
Rob Wilder, founder of the Powershares WilderHill Clean Energy ETF (PBW), an exchange-traded fund, said of investors, “They are hanging on, knowing there’s a bright light at the end of the tunnel.”
So where do you sit?
Although small in scale, confidence is already starting to creep back into all markets and the wider business community now needs to make some decisions that will not only influence the probability of a repeat occurrence of what we are going through at present in the money markets but also, and more importantly, the very sustainability of business going deeper into the ‘noughties’.
On the domestic market front, we are no longer able to manufacture our way out of recession – and that fact has made recovery tougher than it has ever been before – and we know there is no going back to that solution in the future. Do we, therefore, simply go back to the nineties paradigm and engage in even more ruthless spread betting?
Or do we now take pause for thought and become a little more conversant with the facts of climate change, carbon energy depletion and sustainable strategies for growth? Whilst the G20 Summit may have been largely a gang show with no more benefit than raising Gordon Brown’s appallingly poor profile in international circles, it should not be forgotten that the work that went on leading up to the summit at least delivered an agreement that makes building a green and sustainable economy one of the six core commitments of fiscal expansion, “establishing the central role of climate change in economic policy even in the midst of this financial and economic crisis” (Climate Change Secretary, Ed Milibank).
However, where politicians can only follow, the business community must take the lead. Ultimately it is about tangible and measurable actions where the politicians can only give assurances and commitments which most usually conclude in the setting up of bureaucratically heavy committees.
The future really can be green, not only environmentally but also financially; we just have to take the initiative. With over $200 billion available worldwide to sweeten the pill and perhaps stimulate your organisation to look at initiatives it might have felt financially precluded from before, take a fresh, green look at your options… and make the right choice.
