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The Future Could Not Be Clearer for Renewable Energy [View all]
Garvin Jabusch, Green Alpha Advisors
May 30, 2013
<snip>
Renewable energies and sustainable practices can now credibly be said to have the power to increase our standards of living since they provide far greater benefits for far less cost than their economic predecessors. Moreover, since fossil fuels are demonstrably destructive - to the point that their use threatens our society and its ecological underpinnings - arguments that continuing to expand their use somehow minimizes economic risks are nonsense on their face. On the contrary, it’s now clear that failing to reduce use of fossil fuels is among the riskiest things we can do.
Piecing together how the emerging sustainable economy might look turns out to be surprisingly simple, at least in principle. In each area of the economy, we need ask only two questions of each of the various ways of doing business:
Is it notably less destructive to our economy’s ecological underpinnings than other methods of getting the same result?
Can it be employed via a working, profitable business model that lifts the economy and provides employment?
If the answer to both is yes, there’s a good chance that we’ve identified a next economy business idea. Getting at the same things another way, we might ask of a business:
Is it environmentally sustainable?
Is it economically sustainable?
Different people will bring different standards of ‘sustainable’ to this way of defining the green economy, so there will be lots going on and a ton to learn as we piece together the next economy, but the principle, if not the execution, is not complicated. Ideas that lighten our footprint on global ecologies while simultaneously accelerating the world’s economy are emerging, they’re working, and they have every chance of radically altering our up-till-now recklessly destructive path....
May 30, 2013
<snip>
Renewable energies and sustainable practices can now credibly be said to have the power to increase our standards of living since they provide far greater benefits for far less cost than their economic predecessors. Moreover, since fossil fuels are demonstrably destructive - to the point that their use threatens our society and its ecological underpinnings - arguments that continuing to expand their use somehow minimizes economic risks are nonsense on their face. On the contrary, it’s now clear that failing to reduce use of fossil fuels is among the riskiest things we can do.
Piecing together how the emerging sustainable economy might look turns out to be surprisingly simple, at least in principle. In each area of the economy, we need ask only two questions of each of the various ways of doing business:
Is it notably less destructive to our economy’s ecological underpinnings than other methods of getting the same result?
Can it be employed via a working, profitable business model that lifts the economy and provides employment?
If the answer to both is yes, there’s a good chance that we’ve identified a next economy business idea. Getting at the same things another way, we might ask of a business:
Is it environmentally sustainable?
Is it economically sustainable?
Different people will bring different standards of ‘sustainable’ to this way of defining the green economy, so there will be lots going on and a ton to learn as we piece together the next economy, but the principle, if not the execution, is not complicated. Ideas that lighten our footprint on global ecologies while simultaneously accelerating the world’s economy are emerging, they’re working, and they have every chance of radically altering our up-till-now recklessly destructive path....
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2013/05/the-future-could-not-be-clearer-for-renewable-energy?cmpid=WNL-Friday-May31-2013
5 replies
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