Colin Hines and I are the partners in Finance for the Future. It's been going, quietly, since 2007, largely helping to raise funds to keep Colin working on the Green New Deal. But now it's spreading its wing slightly, and we are both working for the next three years at least on QuEST - or how to use quantitative easing, savings and tax to fund the Green New Deal.
There are two items in the media by us in the last two days on this, both featured in full on the Finance for the Future blog (newly launched. The first is my article in The National, yesterday. The second is Colin's letter in the FT this morning.
A summary of the QuEST can be found in this Green Alliance blog by Colin or this version on this blog.
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I hope progress can be made fast on the climate issue. But have you come across a thing called The Energy Charter Treaty which is a giant corporate court with over 50 countries included,
looking after the interests of the energy industry. Currently it is being used by:
two energy companies, Uniper and RWE, to sue the Netherlands over its coal power phaseout
UK oil company, Rockhopper, to sue Italy over a ban on offshore drilling close to the coast
UK fracking company, Ascent Resources, to sue Slovenia for requiring it to assess the environmental impact of fracking plans.
Also, found this article on the CBC (I live in Canada) website which you may find interesting and disturbing https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/pension-fund-investments-fossil-fuels-1.6138550
The money invested in the energy industry in these pension funds would go a long way to funding the Green Deal when diverted appropriately!
That court and others like it are very worrying
One of the most worrying things about these courts is not just the outcome of their decisions – but the ‘chilling’ effect their potential outcomes have on national governments: who will introduce legislation limiting fossil fuel exploitation (for example), if it opens the doors to successful pursuit of (potentially) lost profits?
That, coupled with the fact that – I think I’ve got this right – it’s usually the government who pays the costs of the other side, regardless of whether they win or lose, makes it a low-risk play for a company to take its case to court.
Agreed
I wish I could feel that a new Green Deal will make a difference, but I fear that vested interests will hijack the good intentions to serve their own ends.
For 2 years I’ve been investigating an, admittedly small scale, Green Deal, carried out under a previous Government backed Green Deal scheme. It has led me into a murky world of charlatans, fraudsters and cowboy traders. Total energy consumption has increased, but there has been a trivially small reduction in fuel cost due to a small transfer from relatively expensive electricity, to relatively cheap gas. The debt created is vastly greater than the value of the work done and it would take more than 100 years for the savings to pay it off at current prices. The standard of the work done was criminally negligent (not an exaggeration) with substantial additional costs for repairs to the property and other things. As far as I’m aware, the Scheme has never been evaluated to see if it delivered on its aim to improve energy efficiency. The climate emergency needs a complete change in the way we do things but I fear the World is too wedded to neo-liberal market economics to take the necessary steps.
So we have to change the culture
Indeed!