Climate Change – A business opportunity that knocks

Negotiators at UNFCCC are out of touch with real world of business
Oscar Wilde is supposed to have defined a pessimist as someone who complains of noise when opportunity knocks. While negotiators at UNFCCC (United National Framework Convention for Climate Change) are beckoning about the tiny levels of CO2 reductions, smart CEOs like Lee Scott of Wal-Mart and Marks Spencer, UK are turning out climate change as cash cow creating value for both customers & company in an unprecedented way while protecting environment.
The corporate social responsibility today has turned out to be corporate business opportunity. Businesses are burning midnight oil in showing how socially or environmentally responsible they are. While governments are struggling to cut CO2 by mere 7% below 1990 levels, some smart companies have achieved spectacular results in their bid to drive a low cost economy.
The global rich are going green as never before. This first Sunday Times Green Rich List published recently shows that the enthusiasm among the world’s wealthiest for investments in areas as diverse as electric cars, solar power and geothermal energy is unaffected by the recession.
The Green List has unearthed 100 tycoons or wealthy families worth £200m or more who have made either serious investments in green technology and businesses or hefty financial commitments to environmental causes. In total, the Green 100 are worth nearly £267 billion.
This enormous sum demonstrates that many of the world’s richest tycoons and entrepreneurs have embraced environmentalism. Indeed, our list is dominated by America’s wealthiest financiers and entrepreneurs such as Warren Buffett (worth £27 billion) and Bill Gates (worth £26 billion).
These smart investors, who regularly swap places at the top of Forbes magazine’s annual list of world billionaires, have spent some of their financial firepower on areas such as wind power and electric cars in Buffett’s case, while Gates has backed alternative fuels such as oil from algae. We are not talking trifling sums here. Buffett has invested $230m in the Hong Kong battery-maker BYD.
Of the rich list of 100, 35 are Americans drawn from Silicon Valley. Having made their first fortunes in microchips, the internet or software, the likes of Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin (each worth £7.5 billion) are turning to green investments with all the entrepreneurial zeal that made their first fortunes.
It helps that the Obama administration is committed to a huge stimulus package involving the very technologies that investors are focusing on.
Even tycoons who are not in President Barack Obama’s camp have moved into alternative energy, none more so than T Boone Pickens, oil explorer, corporate raider and a Texan Republican to his core. He is using part of his £1.8 billion fortune on filling the huge and windy Texas Panhandle with turbines as part of his Pickens Plan to wean America off its dependence on foreign energy.
"While American money is chasing smarter and greener technologies, the Chinese are concentrating a mass production of green technologies. The 17 Chinese tycoons in the Top 100 are at the bottom end of the list almost exclusively involved in solar and electric-car technology to cut. India figures no where in this league. India has a huge competitive advantage is solar energy. Almost every house in Europe has a solar panel. Why not in India, ask Dr Madhav Mehra President World Council for Corporate Governance, the brain behind the launch of the Global Human Chain to Pledge PROACTIVATE to combat change in climate. The chain will eventually extended each of the 213 countries from Australia to Alaska.
Dr Mehra added "On this World Environment Foundation while we have all come to pledge PROACTIVATE let us also resolve to ensure that every home in Bangalore has a solar panel".