Regulate Me!

Mindy Lubber, head of Ceres, is writing for Worldchanging from Davos:: “What’s needed now is a clear market signal from Washington that sets the parameters of the regulatory environment in which companies in the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions will operate. ‘You have to have government set the goal, set the timetable,’ Yale professor Daniel Esty told a group of businessmen and government officials here. Then it will be off to the races in the low-carbon, clean technology gold rush.”

This gets to the heart of why all of the big industrial companies are suddenly begging for government to make set a carbon reduction direction. Everyone now knows that some kind of government regulation is inevitable. And once you’re in that mindset, you immediately want clarity on what those regulations will be. As one of the speakers at last fall’s Kyoto Plus conference in Berlin put it, “business people are very good at making decisions in the face of risk…what they have a hard time is making decisions in the face of uncertainty.". I agree with Mindy that we’ve passed a tipping point, and it came earlier than I thought. As they say - “we’re going somewhere fast!".