Brown Not Green
Apr. 2nd, 2009 12:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
webfarmerNot very good news from across the pond.
Fiscal Stimulus and the Environment - Green Standing - The Economist - 02 Apr 09
"Mr Brown’s green New Deal looks similarly flimsy. On March 31st HSBC, a big bank, published a report ranking countries by how green their economic-stimulus packages were. The bank reckons that Britain is allocating just 7% of its fiscal stimulus to greenery, compared with 12% in America, 34% in China and a whopping 81% in South Korea (see chart). A separate report prepared for Greenpeace, a pressure group, by consultants at the New Economics Foundation (NEF) considers only genuinely new funding and arrives at a figure of just 0.6%, or £120m.
Private-sector caution reflects this official inaction. Lower oil prices, sagging demand for energy and hard-to-get credit have caused many firms to cut back on renewables worldwide. But there are particular problems in Britain, not least the falling pound (most of the wind turbines installed there, for example, are built in continental Europe).
Energy companies such as Centrica and EDF, a French firm, are re-evaluating their British renewables projects. Lord Browne, a former boss of the big British oil firm BP, doubts that Britain’s laissez-faire energy policy is up to the job of decarbonising the economy, and wants state-owned banks directed to finance green-energy projects. (BP has opted out of the British renewables market because it expects low returns.) And last year Royal Dutch Shell pulled out of a £3 billion wind-farm in the Thames estuary."
Fiscal Stimulus and the Environment - Green Standing - The Economist - 02 Apr 09
"Mr Brown’s green New Deal looks similarly flimsy. On March 31st HSBC, a big bank, published a report ranking countries by how green their economic-stimulus packages were. The bank reckons that Britain is allocating just 7% of its fiscal stimulus to greenery, compared with 12% in America, 34% in China and a whopping 81% in South Korea (see chart). A separate report prepared for Greenpeace, a pressure group, by consultants at the New Economics Foundation (NEF) considers only genuinely new funding and arrives at a figure of just 0.6%, or £120m.
Private-sector caution reflects this official inaction. Lower oil prices, sagging demand for energy and hard-to-get credit have caused many firms to cut back on renewables worldwide. But there are particular problems in Britain, not least the falling pound (most of the wind turbines installed there, for example, are built in continental Europe).
Energy companies such as Centrica and EDF, a French firm, are re-evaluating their British renewables projects. Lord Browne, a former boss of the big British oil firm BP, doubts that Britain’s laissez-faire energy policy is up to the job of decarbonising the economy, and wants state-owned banks directed to finance green-energy projects. (BP has opted out of the British renewables market because it expects low returns.) And last year Royal Dutch Shell pulled out of a £3 billion wind-farm in the Thames estuary."
