Terry Connelly is dean of the Ageno School of Business at Golden Gate University and is frequently quoted on business, financial, and economic issues by Bay Area local, as well as national, news media.
What we are learning about the environment lately is that business and the money behind it sees green in Green. Just as in health care, where business is beginning to make a real difference in the national debate about affordable access to a universal base of treatment –it was a CEO who wondered aloud recently why we are a country where one has a right to a lawyer but not a doctor– the issue of global warming has been addressed head-on more by commercial interests than governmental.
As a political issue, environmental concern ranks somewhere down the list after Iraq, Iran, terrorism, the economy and health care. If global warming were a college football team, it might rank in the top ten, but not get to a BCS bowl. With political discourse governed almost totally by the safety-first mantra of consultants and focus groups, and with the me-generation in its last throes of acquisitiveness before retirement, the notion of sacrifice for a common (not to say planetary) good is non-starter. Nobel prizes are nice, safe rewards for retired politicians that make us feel good about caring about CO2, so long as it doesn’t cost us anything.
But business sees an opportunity in the technology of alternative energy and particularly in Silicon Valley is not afraid to be out ahead of the general populace in terms of thinking through the risk/reward equations. And it is technology that will clearly precede legislative mandates or executive orders in creating the potential to truly challenge our addiction to fossil fuels. Even business schools are not afraid to adopt green curricula any more (lest they be considered soft on profits); profits are what business sees ahead (and is making even now) in solar and wind power alternatives, clean fuel technologies, and the like.
Where some political leaders see the developing world as a convenient excuse for doing nothing about CO2 emissions in the developed world, business sees vast potential markets for clean energy solutions that can best work (and profit) on a massive scale. Where it used to be only oil companies that planned in twenty-year cycles, it is now possible to look at alternative fuel development in similar ways: not the quick-fix synfuels game of the 70′s and early 80′s, but a venture-backed, patiently capitalized, trial-and-error development of a variety of techniques to address the problem of sustainable development in a warming world.
It all starts with water; business sees that now as the commodity of the decade; and not because Greenland is melting! It is the core issue of sustainable life in the developing world; clean water itself jump-starts truly universal health care. And micro-lending is making a business of water purification where it is needed the most.
And along with water of course is air; and again business sees the size of the opportunity — just think about cleaning up pollution in say, mainland China: now, that’s a market! And even in the US, there is so much more to do than remain stuck in the age of catalytic converters.
Much environmental degradation is itself a product of technology that hangs on past its “use by” date because there is nothing commercially viable to replace it with — yet. Business sees opportunity in this circumstance, as it has in the past. While the political and governmental policy process may be stalled, business accurately perceives that there are far more consumers than voters, so it will leave the States and the Federal Government to the “Red/Blue” fight, and get on with getting Green.
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