Melissa Ross
Just as President Obama touched down in the Everglades to mark Earth Day (and score some political points around climate change and Rick Scott), a globally recognized thought leader on the emerging green economy had a North Florida announcement of her own.
Hazel Henderson of the St. Augustine-based Ethical Markets has released her firm’s 2015 Green Transition Scoreboard® (GTS) touting the goal of “$10 trillion privately invested in the green economy by 2020, easily on track to reach the 2020 goal to effectively scale innovations and reduce costs in green technologies as the world transitions to the Solar Age.”
“Earth Day 2015 marks $6.22 trillion invested in the global green transition since 2007,” says Henderson. “So appropriately, our 2015 GTS report, Breakdowns Driving Breakthroughs, focuses on Life Systems, a new category capturing system-wide interconnections among efficiency, information and digitization, energy, water, food, education and health, which equals 14% of the overall total.”
The GTS tracks investments in renewable energy, green construction and corporate green-themed R&D, representing a broad spectrum of green tech.
Henderson is a renowned futurist, economist and president of Ethical Markets Media, which creates streaming content and shows for public television around the subject of clean and renewable energy.
Here’s a breakdown of the capital investments tracked by the GTS:
| Sector | Amount US $ |
| Renewable Energy | $2,807,484,000,000 |
| Energy Efficiency | $1,566,241,000,000 |
| Life Systems | $876,412,000,000 |
| Green Construction | $639,362,000,000 |
| Corporate Green R&D | $338,478,000,000 |
| Grand Total | $6,227,977,000,000 |
Henderson says the GTS definition of “green” does not include nuclear, clean coal, carbon capture and sequestration, or biofuels from feedstock other than sea-grown algae.
“Recognizing markets make terrible masters but potentially invaluable servants, the Green Transition Scoreboard® provides a strong argument that a diversity of practices can be used in the private sector to address pressing social needs in a the framework of sustainability. It is vital to get this message in front of the private sector and all those who work with commercial enterprises in an era of environmental and social change,” said Daniel Kammen, founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, UC Berkeley.
GTS sources its data from, among others, Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, Reuters; new UN and other international studies; NASA and individual company reports.
Henderson says the world has reached a tipping point when it comes to climate change and sustainability, but that despite much doomsdaying, the trends are overall positive.
“2015 is the year when all the issues of global sustainability are going mainstream and becoming key agendas in the politics of most of the 193 United Nations (UN) member countries. The global transition from fossil fuels and nuclear power to efficient use of renewable energy and materials is now accelerating, as we expected when we launched our Green Transition Scoreboard® (GTS) in 2009,” she said.
“Anticipating the disappointments of the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen, we identified the trends in private sector investing in all the new companies and technologies in solar, wind, efficiency, storage as well as geothermal, wave power and research in the $1.2 trillion total worldwide in 2009. We projected that if the pace of at least $1 trillion annually continues until 2020, that the world’s economies would shift into the more sustainable, cleaner, knowledge-rich technologies of the next era.”
The GTS is released as just as President Obama’s Earth Day Everglades address calls the risks posed by climate change an imminent threat to the state’s economy. Florida is seen as the most vulnerable of all 50 states to rising sea levels.
Not only does extreme weather threaten Florida’s populous coastal cities, rising sea levels could taint fresh water supplies.
The Earth Day address, among other factors, has forced potential presidential contenders Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio to clarify their positions on climate.
But as the politicians battle, Henderson, says it’s a waste of time to look to government to lead on the issue. They’re lagging behind the private sector, which is racing to invest in renewables, she contends.
“The exciting story is that all of these new renewable energy technologies really fitting in with the way nature works are going mainstream — all over the world.
