BusinessGreen.com Review of 2008: October to December

Barack Obama's election heralded a host of green initiatives

October

October was dominated announcements serving to highlight the resilience of the green business movement in the face of increasingly hostile economic head winds.

A raft of studies emerged showing that European green and ethical investment had doubled over the past three years, that the global carbon market was on track to top $100bn, and that clean tech investment was now bigger than investment in biotech, software and the entire GDP of Greece.

There was also good news for the renewables sector on both sides of the Atlantic when the US government finally extended tax credits for the sectior that had been scheduled to expire at the end of the year and the Masdar investment fund stepped in to take Shell's unwanted stake in the flagship London Array offshore wind farm project.

And further good news came when Obama said that addressing the US energy crisis would be his top priority on taking office, while Gordon Brown enjoyed one of his occasional flirtations with the environmental movement by announcing the launch of a new Department of Energy and Climate Change.

Meanwhile, The Royal Society took a rather more pessimistic, or should that be realistic, view of current efforts to tackle climate change and unveiled a major research programme designed to look at ways of artificially cooling the planet's climate in the event that we screw things up beyond all recognition.

November

November 2008, the second time in three months when you could claim, without too much risk of hyperbole, that the world had changed.

The historic election of Barack Obama as US president prompted global celebrations and a sense of genuine optimism that a whole new type of political leadership was possible.

The environmental movement was at the forefront of the victory party, as Obama made a series of green commitments that, if honoured, promise to reinvigorate the global fight against climate change.

Sadly, President Bush responded in an all too familiar manner, taking the scissors to a raft of green regulations - a move Obama's transition team were quick to say they would do their utmost to reverse.

In a world first of a rather different kind, the UK finally passed its long anticipated climate change bill, though not before beefing up the legally binding emission targets still further.

Although anyone tempted to argue that the election of Obama and the emergence of legally binding emission reduction targets would make everything all right were given a nasty shock with the news that climate change is on track to put $2.5 trillion worth of real estate at risk in the coming years, in California alone. He once joked that people thought he was Superman, but given the scale of the challenge Obama faces you'd be forgiven for hoping that he was not joking after all.

And there were also signs that a more imminent global disaster was beginning to present new challenges to the green business movement as a collapse in demand for waste materials saw many firms struggle to find a buyer for recyclate, and the economic crisis resulted in a pre-budget report that contained little succour for green businesses.

December

The year ended with arguably the clearest signs yet that the regulatory framework and investor certainty required to build a low carbon economy is actually taking shape.

European leaders defied the doubters to deliver a climate change action plan that might have failed to keep environmentalists happy, but did promise to result in real and deep emission reductions. While at the same time the UK's independent climate change committee published its first wave of carbon budgets, again signalling to businesses that emission reductions are inevitable.

Across the Atlantic, Obama set out plans for a Green New Deal designed to simultaneously cut emissions and reinvigorate the economy, while further underlining the seriousness with which he took the need to decarbonise the US economy by appointing Nobel Prize winner Stephen Chu as energy secretary.

Just to show things hadn't changed completely the UK government continued to prevaricate over plans for a third runway at Heathrow, delaying the final decision until next year, and the UN's climate change talks in Poznan once again delivered little in the way of meaningful progress.

And Scotland finished the year by claiming it wanted to become the Saudi Arabia of marine energy - one question, where will they get the sand?